Martin Amis, who died last year, was always very concerned about his future place in the literary canon. He said that, since the “truth” about writers is only revealed 50 years after their death, they “feel the honour of being judged by something that is never wrong: time”. Jonathan Glazer’s new film The Zone of Interest is based on Amis’s 2014 novel of the same name. It will undoubtedly revive general interest in the author’s work. But in truth Glazer’s film has very little in common with Amis’s original novel. Its use of the same title verges, in some ways, on travesty. The verbal complexit ..read more

We need to speak more about how to become the kind of man who can openly show love for others while accepting love from those who care. (Shutterstock) How will young men learn to love when many messages seem to be either focused on what is wrong with them — or how they can dominate? Many masculinity critics speak of the dangers of traditional gender ideologies, rape culture or toxic ways of being male. Meanwhile, some men, like Andrew Tate, promote visions of masculinity based on misogyny and male domination, while others, like Jordan Peterson, reinforce traditional gender ideologies as a misg ..read more

Taylor Swift performs at Madison Square Garden in New York, 2019. Brian Friedman/Shutterstock When I started my podcast, Studies in Taylor Swift, in the spring of 2021, I felt that I was simultaneously helping to invent, and trying to catch up to, the academic discipline of Taylor Swift studies. Though there wasn’t much published on reading Swift as literature, I had no trouble finding guests who had some kind of experience teaching Swift or thinking academically about her lyrics. I went on to design a summer school course at Queen Mary University of London on Taylor Swift and Literature in 20 ..read more

A.S. Byatt’s highbrow fiction has a vast, international appeal. The writer, who died in November, was known for her voracious appetite for knowledge and her insatiable curiosity. Inspiration for her work draws from as diverse sources as Elizabeth I, Norse mythology, Amazonian butterflies and Matisse’s paintings. And she turned her hand to many different styles, from Victorian poetry to fairy tales. In their statement about Byatt’s death, her publisher, Penguin, called her “a girl from Sheffield with a strong European sensibility”. That European sensibility is evident in her writing and intervi ..read more

One of the most captivating and enigmatic novelists of the 20th century, Bernice Rubens remains largely unknown despite her remarkable literary achievements. She was the second recipient of the Booker prize in 1970 for her novel The Elected Member and its first female winner. She remains the only Welsh winner in the history of the prize – a fact that perhaps speaks volumes for the way Welsh writing in the English language is perceived and recognised outside of Wales. Rubens was born in the working class area of Adamsdown in Cardiff in 1923, to Polish and Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. She atten ..read more

From a longlist of 12, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on November 26. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo Chetna Maroo’s subtle novel follows a British Asian girl, Gopi, who plays squash fiercely to cope with the grief of her mother’s death. In Western Lane, the squash court becomes an arena for playing out the conflicting emotions flowing between a grieving father and his daughters. Here other tensions also come to the fore, such as her father’s memories of Mombasa in Kenya, the delicate negotiati ..read more

Celebrate Nos Galan Gaeaf with some Welsh gothic fiction. zef art/Shutterstock Wales has sought to rediscover its identity and autonomy since the devolution referendum of 1997. Authors and publishers have embraced the gothic genre as a means of exploring Welsh language, culture and heritage – reflecting on the anxieties Welsh society has experienced since becoming a devolved nation. Halloween (or Nos Galan Gaeaf, as we say in Wales) presents the perfect opportunity for us to explore these social tensions through the macabre. Here are five eerie works of Welsh literature for you to catch up wit ..read more

Rufus Sewell as Will Ladislaw and Juliet Aubrey as Dorothea Brooke in the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch (1994) IMDB In our Guide to the Classics series, experts explain key works of literature. Middlemarch (1872) is a slow read and a deeply immersive one. George Eliot – the pen name of Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) – built rich and complex fictional worlds that she hoped would allow readers to be “better able to imagine and to feel the pains and joys of those who differ from themselves in everything but the broad fact of being struggling, erring human creatures”. This avowedly humanist world-buil ..read more

Hamlet, Act I, Scene 4 – Robert Thew and Henry Fuseli (1796). Wikimedia Commons. A speech in a play by Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries can be as short as a word or as long as several hundred, or anything in between. But what is the most common length? There is an interesting new story emerging about the lengths of speeches in early modern plays. Staying away from Shakespeare himself for a moment, we can take Ben Jonson’s play Volpone (1607) and count the number of speeches and their lengths. The most common length is four words. In the first scene of the play, Volpone asks if an enter ..read more

Shutterstock In Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders (1887), the trees sing. Sometimes the sound is like a Gregorian chant, a threnody from the rustling leaves, the creaking boughs, the undulations of limbs heavy with leaves, swaying in the wind that rushes through the woods of Dorset’s Little Hintock. At other times, it is a low moan, a cry of pain, voiced as if in sympathy with the tragic plight of the characters who wander through these woods, searching for something lost or never quite possessed – for a Hardyian character is always driven by a restive compulsion to move. Even in stillness, Hard ..read more