Essays

A selection from the essays on literature that I have posted regularly online since 2017. Click on the title to read any essay.

POETRY

A poem by Charles Causley

A poem by R.S.Thomas

A poem by Ted Hughes

Always afternoon

How Walt Whitman invented the movies

John Donne, Elizabethan poet

Longfellow

On the origin of Dylan Thomas

The ambiguity of Robert Browning

The first modern English poem

Two poets from Hull

SHAKESPEARE

Did Shakespeare believe in fairies?

Hamlet, post-Reformation tragedy

Honest Iago

Lear’s Fool

Macbeth and me

No such thing as Shakespearean tragedy

Reading Shakespeare

Shakespeare’s girls

The comedy of Troilus and Cressida

Was Shakespeare a Catholic?

DRAMA

Again! Again!

An alchemist of the modern age

Better sung

Beyond melancholy

Listening to Samuel Beckett

Modern theatre’s debt to Ben Jonson

Poems with stage directions

Samuel Beckett’s debt to Maurice Maeterlinck

Stories without words

Why do people find Chekhov boring?

FICTION

An odd kind of novel

Chandler’s Inferno

From Shakespeare to Hardy

Making it up

Modern fiction and the nature of Gothic

No book has ever changed my life

Peasants

Pincher Martin

Stephen King’s debt to Tolstoy