“Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.” Ernest Hemingway’s remark is usually taken as a piece of hard-won practical wisdom, though it depends, rather heavily, on the assumption that sobriety has the authority to correct what intoxication has distorted. Literature, for the most part, is less confident on this point and increasingly so as one moves into the twentieth century, where the corrective function of the morning after

If a book produces as much pleasure upon revisits as during the first read, you know you’ve stumbled across a rare treasure. Only a handful have earned the title in my (limited) experience; Tess of the D’Urbervilles was the first to do so. I was sixteen when I set foot into Thomas Hardy’s enchanting Wessex, which I blissfully rediscovered last week. The tale, set against the backdrop of bucolic dairies, is not all May Day dances and plentiful harvests. It is a textbook exa

‘If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense.’ So says Alice, or rather Lewis Carroll through her, before tumbling down the...

My first article as a lobsterman (also known as a harvester) was pessimistically named ‘The Impending Fiasco of the Paris Olympics’. A laughable title, you might now argue, and I would agree. I was wrong: Paris did not succumb to stereotypes of manic disorganisation and surprise protests – rather, it is unanimously acknowledged that these Games were a twinned success for France and for the future of the Olympics. Yet the French enjoy a little controversy, and so I must obli

The seed of tragedy is sown upon one’s decision to be great. The declaration, so often made in youth, seems to correlate, if not causate, years of toil which crack at one’s resolution until, for many, it begins to recede entirely. Still, the urge for greatness is unsurprising. For when upon entry to adulthood the world opens itself up to you so entirely, greatness seems only a subtle stretch beyond mundanity. The decision to martyr oneself for something—anything—seems a noble

What makes a classic? As an answer – or to avoid the rather puzzling question – you might name some: Anna Karenina , Nineteen Eighty-Four , David Copperfield . And then move on to more straightforward literary topics: what’s your favourite Shakespeare play? What do you think of Salman Rushdie’s new book? But let’s return to the matter of the classic for a moment. Mark Twain puts it pithily: a classic is ‘a book which people praise and don’t read.’ It’s a painfully ironic

What is most interesting about “The Waste Land”, is its relentless reliance on elements of the past. Of course, as much could arguably be said about any work of literature or history, and its intent seems perfectly reasonable given that, to put it simply, Eliot laments the present in favour of a more meaningful past. But it also seems to raise important questions about the nature of literature and its relationship to history, and the extent to which every literature is not in

April is perhaps the best month to drive around the battlefields of the Somme. Whilst not experiencing the ‘Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain’ of which Edward Thomas speaks, the persistent drizzle this time of year does give a feel for the bleakness of life in the trenches. After picking up a volume of Thomas’ poetry a few weeks ago, I decided a second trip to this region was very much in order. I first visited the Somme on a school trip, as is relatively commo