The little white attic

Hello friends, fans, and foes, I have just returned from Berlin. Joseph Andrews and Parson Adams were my companions on the work trip. Let’s ...

In September, I read Moments of Reprieve , my third Primo Levi book after If This Is a Man (aka Survival in Auschwitz ) and The Truce (a...

1/ My first blog post about Pamela , I know, wasn’t very enthusiastic. Around page 100 is when the novel becomes more interesting: Samuel Ri...

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela is foundational for the epistolary form. Not the first epistolary novel ever written, but the one to start the c...

Under my previous blog post about Dangerous Liaisons  (or  Les Liaisons dangereuses ) , Michael wrote:  “I feel odd commenting because I’ve...

1/ It was clearly a mistake to neglect French literature for so long.  Up till now, the writer I’ve read who seems to have the best understa...

1/ In some blog post about Don Quixote , I have noted that Shakespeare and Cervantes are both fascinated by disguise, pretence, and manipula...

As I’m enjoying  Les Liaisons dangereuses or  Dangerous Liaisons by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (translated by Helen Constantine), I’ve bee...

Perfect Days (2023):  I have never been fond of films in which nothing happens. It’s got a critics’ score of 96% on Rotten Tomatoes, and aud...

Every time I revisit a Shakespeare play or read a new piece of criticism, I see something new. His plays are so rich, so complex, so endless...