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...

In June, I finally got to visit the Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire.  In September, I visited Jane Austen’s grave at Winch...

1/ Some time last year, I read The School for Wives (in Richard Wilbur’s translation). What I didn’t know was that the play was a scandal a...

A few days ago, I finally managed to visit Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire. It was great.  This is where Jane Austen revise...

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...

In an earlier blog post, I wrote “I actually had more trouble trying to understand the characters in The Tale of Genji (about 1,000 years ol...

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...

It is an unwritten rule on the internet that whenever you speak about reading Shakespeare, someone is to appear and (angrily) say “Plays are...

From Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent :  “Shakespeare is an international language, a beacon for humanity, and a bridge across culture...

Alexandra Gilbreath as Hermione and Antony Sher as Leontes (my favourite production).  I have just reread The Winter’s Tale . What a wonderf...

A recent (stupid) conversation on the hellsite previously known as Twitter has made me realise something interesting. When it comes to range...

In a blog post from 2013 , Himadri (Argumentative Old Git) wrote:  “It is demonstrable that people who have grown up in very different cultu...

  Shakespeare in Swahililand is an interesting read—I don’t know a lot about Africa—and looks to me to be a good response to the foolish no...