Category: Literature
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Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is no…
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The Human Condition According to Ovid
By Bergotte If Homer is the poet of what we lose, Ovid is the poet of what we become. Writing at the height of Roman civilisation and dying at its edge — exiled, cold, forgotten on the shore of the Black Sea — Publius Ovidius Naso produced a body of work that is dazzling, troubling,…
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Bret Easton Ellis
Essay · Literature & Ideas The Novelist Who Refused to Flinch Bret Easton Ellis published his first novel at twenty-one and his most notorious at twenty-six, and spent the following three decades being misread by people who wanted him to be either a moralist or a monster, when he was in fact something rarer and…
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The Ten Novels That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country unusually dependent on story. Before it became a superpower, before it became a marketplace, before it became a screen onto which the rest of the world projected desire and dread, it was already narrating itself: as wilderness, covenant, republic, frontier, refuge, opportunity, innocence, exception, destiny. No nation has been…
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Difficult Men: The Heroes of the Brontë Novels and What We Have Made of Them
Rochester broods. Heathcliff rages. Huntingdon drinks. The men of the Brontë novels have been romanticised for nearly two centuries. It may be time to look at them more carefully. By Bergotte There is a moment in Jane Eyre that readers have been arguing about since 1847. Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield Hall, has just revealed…
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The Human Condition According to Homer
By Bergotte There is a moment in the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad that has no real parallel in world literature. Priam, the aged king of Troy, has crossed enemy lines in the dark, slipped past the Greek sentinels, and entered the tent of Achilles — the man who killed his son, who dragged that…
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A Room with a View
Essay · Literature & Ideas The View From the Window and the Cost of Looking A Room with a View is a comedy, and it is a love story, and it is a novel about Florence, and it is a sustained philosophical argument about the relationship between the body and the soul that Forster dressed…
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The Decorated Life: The Bloomsbury Group, Charleston, and the Art of Living Differently
They remade British culture, reinvented the novel, revolutionised art criticism, and painted every available surface of a Sussex farmhouse in colours that the English countryside had never previously entertained. A century later, the Bloomsbury Group remains the most argued-about, most imitated, and most misunderstood intellectual community in English literary history. By Bergotte There is a…
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Roger Hargreaves’ The Mr. Men
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,…
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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 Norman…
