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The Protean Ursula K. Le Guin
Charles Vess: The Books of Earthsea (2018)i.m. Ursula Kroeber Le Guin(21 October 1929 - 22 January 2018)It's hard to think of a time when I hadn't read Ursula Le Guin's work. I suppose I can date it...
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In Haunted Christchurch
NZSA (Canterbury)InvitationWe flew down for this event. Partly from curiosity, I must confess. I haven't really spent any time in Christchurch since the earthquake (though Bronwyn has), and I wanted to...
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Classic Ghost Story Writers (4): H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft and friendIt's tempting to be facetious about the strange worlds of H. P. Lovecraft, "the twentieth century horror story's dark and baroque prince," as Stephen King famously described...
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The Peripeteia of Frances Yates
Frances Yates: The Art of Memory (1966)And what, pray tell, does 'peripeteia' mean when it's at home? a sudden reversal of fortune or change in circumstances, especially in reference to fictional...
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Classic Ghost Story Writers (5): Colin Wilson
Colin Wilson (1957)I used to feel a bit ashamed of reading books by Colin Wilson. They definitely fall into the 'guilty pleasures' category. As you can see from the list below, I collected his fiction...
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11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month
P.J. Hammond: Sapphire and Steel: The Railway Station (1979)Perhaps all wars require a mythic dimension to put alongside their otherwise irredeemable horror and brutality. The abduction of Helen by...
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Boneland: Alan Garner
Alan Garner (1934- )There's an early Alan Garner story called "Feel Free" included in Susan Dickinson's anthology The Restless Ghost and Other Encounters and Experiences (1970). I read it while I was...
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Jack's Beijing Adventure (1): The Course
The New Zealand Centre, Weiming Lake, Peking UniversityThe course is called New Zealand: History & Culture, and it's taught this year by six visiting Academics from Massey University: Associate...
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Jack's Beijing Adventure (2): The Wall
The Great Wall of China (23/11/18)I had two lectures to give: one on the Wednesday after I arrived, the other on the Wednesday I left. For the most part, the time in-between was free for sightseeing or...
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Jack's Beijing Adventure (3): The Forbidden City
The Forbidden City (27/11/18)Here I am, just along from that classic view of Mao's portrait, about to enter the Forbidden City: the emperor's private domain, reserved solely for the royal family and...
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Jack's Beijing Adventure (4): To Peking University
Ariva Hotel, Haidian Road South, BeijingSo, if you imagine us taking a walk through the streets of Beijing towards Peking University, this is our starting point: the massive Ariva Hotel.A somewhat...
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Breaking the Million-Hit Barrier
PageviewsI definitely feel like breaking out the champagne today. One million hits on my blog! That seems like quite a lot to me.It all started in 2010, when they introduced a new feature on blogspot...
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Herman Melville as Poet
Herman Melville: Complete Poems (2019)Complete Poems: Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War / Clarel / John Marr and Other Sailors / Timoleon / Posthumous & Unpublished. 1866, 1876, 1888 & 1891....
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The Talented Mr. Carpenter
Humphrey Carpenter with Dame Antonia Fraser (1988)Alan Bennett's 2009 play The Habit of Art, a curious work devoted almost wholly (it would seem) to denigrating the late great W. H. Auden (cf. the...
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The Garnett Family (1): Richard, Edward et al.
Sir Leslie Ward: Richard Garnett (1895)They certainly were a remarkable clan. And what better way to start off the New Year than with some bibliographical reflections on all these Garnetts, young and...
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Robert Lowell Revisited
Kay Redfield Jamison: Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire (2017)Roughly seven years ago, I wrote a post detailing my views on the work of Robert Lowell's then two principal biographers, Ian...
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The Garnett Family (2): In Defence of Constance
Meryl Streep makes herself up as Constance Garnett in The Idiots Karamazov (1975)There's a fascinating passage in David Garnett's autobiography The Golden Echo (1953), where he describes how his mother...
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Kipling and the Cross-Correspondences
Deborah Blum: Ghost Hunters (2006)Among the founders of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882 were psychologist Edmund Gurney (1847-1888), philosopher Henry Sidgwick (1838-1900) and...
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The Mysteries of Ashburton
The Turrets of the Ashburton Post Office (1901)A lot of people have used that title - The Mysteries of ... [somewhere or other] - since Ann Radcliffe first dreamed it up in 1794. She may have been...
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Fyre Festival: We have been here before
Fyre Festival (2017)Well, like everyone else in the western world, it seems, I duly watched the Netflix documentary on the absurd act of hubris that was the Fyre Festival. And like everyone else, I...
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