Essay · Literature & Ideas Little Books, Absolute Selves Roger Hargreaves set out in 1971 to answer his son’s question about what a tickle looks like, and in doing so produced one of the stranger philosophical projects of the twentieth century: a universe populated entirely by beings who are identical to their own single quality,Continue reading “Roger Hargreaves’ The Mr. Men”
Category Archives: Literature
The Little Man in the Big House: Hercule Poirot and the Strangeness of England
Agatha Christie gave the world’s most famous detective a moustache, a foreign accent, and a profound dislike of the English countryside. It was, in every sense, the point. By Bergotte There is a village in the English imagination that has never quite existed and has never stopped existing. It has a church with a NormanContinue reading “The Little Man in the Big House: Hercule Poirot and the Strangeness of England”
The Education of Helplessness: Of Human Bondage and the Novel That Refused to Lie
Somerset Maugham called it the book that saved his life. He also said it was the worst kind of novel — an autobiographical one. He was right on both counts, which is precisely why it endures. By Bergotte There is a type of novel that functions less like a work of art than like aContinue reading “The Education of Helplessness: Of Human Bondage and the Novel That Refused to Lie”
Ways of Being Seen: John Berger and the Art of Paying Attention
Eight years after his death, the critic, novelist, and storyteller who changed how we look at art remains the most generous — and the most radical — writer England ever produced. By Bergotte There is a moment in the first episode of Ways of Seeing — the 1972 BBC television series that made John Berger,Continue reading “Ways of Being Seen: John Berger and the Art of Paying Attention”
The Wound and the Camera: Susan Sontag and the Unfinished Project of Seeing
Twenty years after her death, the great critic’s ideas about images, suffering, and the moral life feel less like history than like prophecy. By Bergotte There is a photograph that Susan Sontag never saw — or rather, she could not have seen it in the form we now encounter it, scrolling past it on aContinue reading “The Wound and the Camera: Susan Sontag and the Unfinished Project of Seeing”
Ripley Part II: The Many Lives of Tom Ripley: From Highsmith’s Novels to Screen Legends
When Patricia Highsmith published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, she created a new kind of antihero: elegant, amoral, adaptable, and disturbingly successful. Tom Ripley not only survives but thrives, slipping into identities, murdering when necessary, and always convincing us — against our better judgment — to follow him. Over five novels (collectively known asContinue reading “Ripley Part II: The Many Lives of Tom Ripley: From Highsmith’s Novels to Screen Legends”
Ripley Part I: The Two Talented Mr. Ripleys: Page, Screen, and the Art of Ambiguity
Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is one of the most enduring crime novels of the twentieth century. Published in 1955, it introduced Tom Ripley, a young conman who insinuates himself into the lives of the wealthy and, through a combination of charm and violence, takes their place. The book was a revelation: not aContinue reading “Ripley Part I: The Two Talented Mr. Ripleys: Page, Screen, and the Art of Ambiguity”
The Human Condition According to Joseph Conrad
By Bergotte Joseph Conrad wrote about the darkness at the centre of things — not as a metaphor, not as a philosophical proposition to be argued and defended, but as a lived reality that his own extraordinary life had given him direct and repeated access to. He was a Polish nobleman who became a BritishContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Joseph Conrad”
Surrealism: The Logic of Dreams
Few movements in 20th-century art captured the imagination as forcefully, or as lastingly, as Surrealism. Emerging in the 1920s from the embers of Dada and the disillusionment of World War I, Surrealism sought not only to revolutionize art but to liberate human consciousness itself. It was not a style, but an attitude — a wayContinue reading “Surrealism: The Logic of Dreams”
Life Magazine: America in Pictures
For much of the twentieth century, Life magazine was not just a publication — it was a window through which Americans saw the world, and the world saw America. From 1936, when publisher Henry Luce reimagined the title as a weekly news magazine told primarily through photographs, until its decline as a mass-market force inContinue reading “Life Magazine: America in Pictures”
My World of Interiors 