The Price of a Book

This is a story that was not meant to be told. That it has been told is partly serendipitous. In 1926 the daughter of an Irish aristocrat, Violet Gibson, attempted to assassinate the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in Rome. After being beaten up and imprisoned in Italy she was returned to England and immediately incarcerated […]

Non Serviam: The Anarchy of James Joyce

When James Joyce has Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of both A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (A Portrait) and Ulysses, say “Non serviam” or “I will not serve”, he is merely restating Joyce’s own political, spiritual, and artistic creed. While almost everything that can be written about Joyce has been, it’s still not well known […]

The Horror of H.P. Lovecraft

Even wordsmiths have difficulty describing the immensity of the universe. After all, our sun is 1,000,000 times bigger than the earth and our galaxy contains approximately 300 billion stars, but there are also 100 million galaxies in our observable universe. Moreover, our observable universe, which is 13 billion light years away (1 light year = 6 trillion […]

‘Parade’s End’, A ‘Downton Abbey’ For Grown Ups

I have just finished reading what is, perhaps, one of the greatest 20th century novels in the English language. The author, Ford Madox Ford, is certainly not unknown, particularly as Parade’s End came out as a successful BBC miniseries in 2012, with the protagonist played by Benedict Cumberbatch. However Ford Madox Ford is certainly not a […]