Literary Essays
It is 100 years since the birth of Roald Dahl – considered by many to be the world’s number one storyteller. His books have received enthusiastic responses from millions of children all around the world.
"Rare words, those that go beyond the 3,000 most common ones, are 10 times more likely to show up in dinner conversation than in storybooks."
Lore Segal, author of Shakespeare’s Kitchen, Her First American and Other People’s Houses, talked with Mary L.
One of the highlights of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival is undoubtedly a new production of Paul Bright
T.S. Eliot reflected that if there was one word that could be associated with classic works of art, it was maturity. He compared Shakespeare's creative life cycle to that of an exact contemporary:
The unhappy life of the classical pianist is rarely featured in modern novels. I’ve always found this odd. The inherent drama of a career soloist should be raw meat for the writer.
It’s a rare medical man who can shift from his world of arcane jargon to a vigorous, earthy style suited to non-fiction novels. Once in a while, a Chekhov or a Somerset Maugham comes along to make an exception and prove the rule.
We are a society which, as a rule, prefers good order to bad, desires sensible laws to prevail over anarchy and proposes for all just the right amount of liberality to allow us to feel free without the inconvenience of actually being so.
Have we ever known him? The Will of Rosalind and Kate, Puck, Hal, Macbeth and Beatrice? And, if not really knowing Will, are these people who came mewling, laughing, raging or loving to the stage also strangers to us?
Bernard Shaw once observed that a biography tells more about the biographer than the subject.
Any person who has reached a reasonable age will probably have endured that unpleasant feeling, on waking after a satisfactory night of too much alcohol and an abundance of spirited conversation, of feeling embarrassed at things they remember saying and anxiety about w