I taught Tennyson’s major poems to university students for many, many years. I love these poems with all my heart, and what the historian and biographer Richard Holmes has done is give them back to me, fresh, vital, immediate, urgent, moving, miraculous.
Holmes demonstrates his lucid and masterful power of interpretation when he gives us a close reading of the language, form, and register of these poems. He places Tennyson in the midst of the intellectual tidal waves of his times: the religious upheaval unleashed by new scientific perceptions, the revolutionary debates on our origins with Charles Darwin at the core, the astronomical revelations of the vast universe around us.
Tennyson’s extraordinary elegy for his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam, "In Memoriam AHH," is a central document in the history of Victorian poetry and should be in our times too.
A Book of the Year in the Times; Telegraph; Spectator; Financial Times; Observer; Waterstones and Daunt Books
A dazzling new biography of young Tennyson by the prize-winning, bestselling author of The Age of Wonder.
Alfred Lord Tennyson is now remembered - if he is remembered at all - as the gloomily bearded Poet Laureate, author of such clanking Victorian works as 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', and the mournful author of the lugubrious elegy In Memoriam. In this dazzling new biography, Richard Holmes reawakens this somnolent Victorian figure, brings him back to sparkling…
This novelle, which I read for the first time this year, is one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing that I have ever read.
I first tried reading Stifter in the original German while at school, and failed to understand any of it. But I hadn’t read this terrifying fairy tale, which is for adults only. The narrative uses the classic tropes of the fairy tale—two children visit relatives in the next valley, and while crossing the mountains, they are lost in the snow.
The drama of the story takes place in the shift of register when the children find themselves no longer in the world of forest and fairy tale but in a realist landscape and eternal geological time on the mountain glacier.
The writing is extraordinary, uncanny, pitiless, the tension almost unbearable.
✨ Rock Crystal: A Christmas Tale ✨ 14 Point Font for Eye Comfort by Adalbert Stifter With Reflections by Andrea Guadalupe Gonzales
Some stories only grow more radiant with time. First published in 1845, Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal (Bergkristall) has long been cherished as a quiet masterpiece of 19th-century literature.
On Christmas Eve, two children set out from their mountain village and lose their way in the snow. Their simple journey becomes a story of survival, but also a meditation on nature's beauty, the resilience of the human spirit, and the mystery of God's providence.
I first read this wonderful book in manuscript. This is a moving history of a queer male community, right at the heart of the British establishment, associated with King’s College, Cambridge.
The stories woven together by Professor Goldhill are filled with gossip, scandal, revelations, startling connections, delightful tales of lust, quarrels, thwarted desire, and pure pleasure. Goldhill’s research is meticulous, and he writes with gripping lucidity. Some of his characters, such as E.M.Forster, Rupert Brooke, and M.R. James are well known. But many untold and extraordinary stories are to be found here, too.
The decades covered by the narrative stretch from the 19th century through the first part of the 20th century, a period when homosexuality was illegal and then gradually, if often grudgingly, accepted.
Queer Cambridge recounts the untold story of a gay community living, for many decades, at the very heart of the British Establishment. Making effective use of chiefly forgotten archival sources - including personal diaries and letters - the author reveals a network that was in equal parts tolerant and acerbic, and within which the queer Fellows of Cambridge University explored bold new forms of camaraderie and relationship. Goldhill examines too the huge influence that these individuals had on British culture, in its arts, politics, music, theatre and self-understanding. During difficult decades when homosexuality was unlawful, gay academics - who included…
I wrote the Seven Tales over a period of years. They are all first-person narratives, but written for very different characters and voices. And they are both realistic as well as fantastical and somewhat uncanny.
I am very interested in the shifting registers of tales: are they comical? Ironic? Terrifying? I wanted the atmosphere and setting of each tale to be unique. And the experience of reading each one to be startling, gripping from the very first line.
Could the same person have written the first tale about a woman longing to have sex with a god? And the last about a playwright having a row with her neighbours and ending up acting in King Lear at the Narbonne Shakespeare Festival? Maybe? Read on.
