Month: September 2008
William Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Folger Library Edition)
To thine own self be true … William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet is arguably the most famous play ever written in the English language; it presents the world with questions and characters that have been the subject of thespian and scholarly debate ever since the Prince of Denmark’s first appearance on the stage of London’s Globe Theatre. […]
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Agatha Christie: Miss Marple – The Complete Short Stories
Dear Aunt Jane’s Shorter Cases “Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival,” Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie‘s own grandmother and her friends, […]
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William Shakespeare: The Sonnets
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage … Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written embassage, To witness duty, not to show my wit. (Sonnet No. 26) How to do justice to the legacy of literary history’s greatest mind – moreover in such a limited review? Forget Goethe’s […]
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Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Beauty is a form of Genius.” Oscar Wilde was one of the foremost representatives of Aestheticism, a movement based on the notion that art exists for no other purpose than its existence itself (“l’art pour l’art”), not for the purpose of social and moral enlightenment. Born in Dublin and a graduate of Oxford’s Magdalen College, […]
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Agatha Christie: The Thirteen Problems
The Tuesday Club Puzzles “Miss Marple insinuated herself so quickly into my life that I hardly noticed her arrival,” Agatha Christie wrote in her posthumously-published autobiography (1977) about the elderly lady who, next to Belgian super-sleuth Hercule Poirot, quickly became one of her most beloved characters. Somewhat resembling Christie‘s own grandmother and her friends, although […]
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John Nichols: A Fragile Beauty
In Harmony With the Earth “An albatross around his neck” John Nichols called his 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War in an afterword to the book’s 1994 anniversary edition, because he felt that particularly after Milagro had, over multiple obstacles, been made into a 1988 movie directed by Robert Redford, it had eclipsed much of […]
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