Pavel Chagochkin/Shutterstock.com
The 1921 play R.U.R. introduced the world to the word ‘robots’. Its plot is remarkably similar to robot stories told today.
Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton.
Liam Daniel/Netflix
The Regency period was full of gossip and scandal, something Bridgerton gets right. However, it leaves out the period’s grim record on slavery.
Statue of James Joyce reading at his grave in Zurich, Switzerland.
STEFFEN SCHMIDT/EPA
Get past the first 100 pages and you’ll see that Joyce’s style of writing mostly goes against what philosophers understand of the stream of consciousness.
Palace Films
Based on Joanna Rakoff’s memoir of working for JD Salinger’s agent, the film lacks some of the wit but none of the heart of Joanna’s story.
Jacob Lund/Shutterstock
With the third national lockdown under way, how can E.M. Forster’s neglected masterpiece help us survive the next few months?
Japanese author Yukio Mishima speaks to Japanese Self-Defense Force soldiers at Tokyo’s military garrison station on Nov. 25, 1970.
JIJI PRESS/AFP via Getty Images
Like a Rorschach test, the incident offers limitless interpretations. But newly published photographs of Yukio Mishima in his final weeks alive show an artist obsessed with scripting out death.
Andy Rain/EPA
Looking closer at the Spanish writer’s life work shows that social and cultural prejudices have kept us from seeing the full picture
We all read much more than we give ourselves credit for.
GoodStudio/Shuttertsock
Want to read more but feel overwhelmed or struggle to find the time? Here are five tips to help you on your way.
flickr
Written by Kenneth Grahame as a story for his young son, The Wind in the Willows has also been read as a social satire and a gay allegory.
Ernest Hemingway, July 1918, American Red Cross Hospital, Milan, Italy.
Buckley, Peter, Ernest, Dial Press, New York, 1978
Hemingway’s response to death and disease was very different from the parody that circulated earlier this year.
Master craftsman: David Cornwell (better known as John le Carré).
EPA-EFE/Guido Manuilo
The archive of David Cornwell’s work at the Bodleian Library in Oxford also reveals the depth of his collaboration with his wife Jane.
Harry Potter’s adventures take on a new significance during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
(Shutterstock)
Rereading Harry Potter during the COVID-19 pandemic means finding new ways of identifying with the characters, especially in the seventh book, where Harry finds himself struggling with isolation.
Increasingly, Americans seem to have irreconcilable differences over the pandemic, the economy – even the result of the 2020 election.
Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
Homer and Aeschylus turned to the divine to write their happy endings. But no gods are conspiring above the US, ready to swoop down and save humankind from itself.
National Film & Sound Archive
Miles Franklin’s masterpiece features an untamed, unapologetic heroine, positing a choice between career and love rather than women ‘having it all’.
Host of popular true crime podcast Serial, American journalist Sarah Koenig.
Penn State/Flikr
Penny dreadfuls told real stories of murder and mayhem to 19th-century audiences seeking escape from city life. True crime podcasts have a lot in common with them.
During the pandemic moments have folded into each other and time has moved in an odd way. The Alarm Clock by Diego Rivera.
Wikimedia
Just because two events last a month does not mean they both last the same amount of time.
Douglas Stuart, author of the Booker prize-winning Shuggie Bain.
Clive Smith/Booker
The story of child poverty in 1980s Glasgow speaks to current concerns across the UK.
Netflix’s series The Haunting of Hill House was inspired by the book of the same name by Shirley Jackson.
Steve Dietl/Netflix
From ghosts and meddling staff to interesting decorating choices, the houses in these books make for great reading.
Kate Winslet in the 2015 film The Dressmaker. The film was based on the novel by Australian writer Rosalie Ham.
Screen Australia, Film Art Media, White Hot Productions
Literature funding has been cut brutally in recent years and writers’ incomes are disastrously low. Yet books shape our national identity, forming an often invisible bedrock for the wider economy.
John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo.
Courtesy pmexpressngr
Nigeria’s poet and playwright, John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo, died on October 13 aged 86