The little white attic

1/ As I consider buying a Muriel Spark omnibus, I’m idly thinking about the books I own. We all know reading and book buying are two differe...

I quit on Jane and Prudence after about 50 pages.  Some of you will probably say I’m missing the point, but Barbara Pym writes about the tr...

1/ Look at the defence of novels in Northanger Abbey :  ““I am no novel-reader—I seldom look into novels—Do not imagine that I often read n...

The other day, I tweeted about Tom Payne’s translation of The Art of Love : “Picked up this copy of “The Art of Love” but I had to quit afte...

A list of the 10 literary works I think about, or revisit, most often:  The Iliad  The Odyssey  King Lear  Othello  Shakespeare’s Sonnets  D...

Painting by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein. 1/ As I picked up the Odyssey , I jokingly said to friends, let’s see what literature was lik...

A Grecian vase depicting Odysseus and the Sirens (why is Odysseus naked though?).  1/ Here is something interesting Homer does in the Odyss...

I know, I wrote that the last blog post was my response once and for all to the mantra “Plays are meant to be seen, not read.” But I want to...

My collage of all the 7 Annas I have seen (in chronological order).  One common problem with adaptations of Anna Karenina is that, because ...

(An image created by MidJourney that caused controversy a few years ago when winning a photography/ digital art award).  1/ I once saw a twe...

1/ Now that I’ve finished reading David Copperfield after about 6 weeks (though I did take a break and spent a few days reading The Sorrows...

Under my last blog post, I got a comment from Thomas Parker asking how I selected translations, so let’s jot down some thoughts.  1/ Anyone ...

Yesterday I watched two Czechoslovakian films: Alice and When the Cat Comes (both of which I recommend). As I was watching Alice , Jan Šva...