Carol Rumens: This week, a heartfelt but enigmatic love poem from the court of King Henry VIII
The Earl of Rochester's highly candid poetry was mirrored by his anarchic life, says Ian Thomson
This is not a conventional work of criticism and is all the better for it. Indeed, so far does it depart from the norms of academia that at times it is unclear whether Paterson is writing about Shakespeare or Shakespeare about Don Paterson. As the introduction declares, "reading a Shakespeare sonnet is an act of authorship".
Sian Norris reconsiders Daphne du Maurier's novels
I’m reading 20 classic, modern-classic or cult books. I aimed to read them all in 2011, but that’s beginning to look unlikely. Read more about this project here. Why did I want to read it? I think …
A dusty box of love letters bought for £25 in a Hainault auction house are shedding a romantic light on the 1930s.
The Bell Jar was published less than a month before Sylvia Plath killed herself on 11 February 1963. To mark the 50th anniversary of her death, writers and poets reflect on what her work means to them
In the spirit of Banned Books Week, we’ve pulled together some of the responses to one of the most controversial books of the twentieth century: Amer
Seventy years on, and its appeal is as broad as ever. As the NFT reissues Hitchcock's adaptation, Liz Hoggard revisits du Maurier's modern classic
Lessing's radical exploration of communism, female liberation, motherhood and mental breakdown was hailed as the 'feminist bible' and reviled as 'castrating'. Four generations of writers – Diana Athill, Margaret Drabble, Rachel Cusk and Natalie Hanman – reflect on what it means to them
William Shakespeare Plays. View all Shakespearean workbooks at the IQ Matrix Store: store.iqmatrix.com/product-category/shakespearean-workbooks
The Earl of Rochester was a libertine famous for his bawdy verses who bravely satirised Charles II’s court. Alexander Larman celebrates the life of a gloriously reckless poetic spirit
When I was preparing to write this column I was of the firm opinion that Maximillian de Winter was a definite douchebag. My vague memories of him, from reading the book years ago, were of a cold man who married a mouse of a girl and then began to coolly neglect her as she was...
‘There were 117 psychoanalysts on the Pan Am flight to Vienna and I’d been treated by at least six of them’: so opens Erica Jong’s iconic feminist 1973 novel Fear of Flying, famous for its unflinching depiction of female sexuality. Jong’s book is back in the conversation after being serialised on BBC Radio 4
Don’t boo, fret or bed-wet. Vote!
A big biography of John Cheever.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopian novel is being reissued to mark its centenary. But, asks Lindy West, given its undercurrents of racism and hostile attitude to abortion, can it teach us anything in 2015?
One in a series of typographic posters featuring literary quotes to promote a local library. It's better on black: www.flickr.com/photos/55109135@N02/5381351539/lightbox/
1991 An afternoon in late 1991 found me on a Sydney bus reading Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (1991). A disembarking passenger paused at my side and, as I glanced up, hissed, ‘I don’t know how you can read that filth’. As she continued to make her way to the front of the vehicle, I was as stunned as if she had struck me...
Code Red – we have a 17th Century Rake Alert!!! John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, who in his thirty-three years of life was one of the most dissolute, reckless, cocksure members of Charles …
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Although the intertextual link between Rebecca and Jane Eyre has been patently obvious to many readers, no reference, either explicit or implicit, can be found in the later novel. Moreover, Daphne ...
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) The sonnet form has been used by many poets in many languages since it was invented in the Middle Ages. It really arrived in English literature during …
