Sexy Shakespeare
Peter Holland
The new RSC Shakespeare makes some radical decisions - and contains some "raunchy" readings - but owes little to the RSC's own productions |
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The timeless Marguerite Duras
Emilie Bickerton
History has written Duras with her contemporaries, the existentialists; but it makes more sense to split them apart |
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Henry James in France
Matthew Peters
A perceptive new book explains why James's year in Paris was crucial for later developments in his fiction |
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Blue-collar Solzhenitsyn
Zinovy Zinik
Alexander Solzhenitsyn once dedicated his life to the fight against the state security machine; but he has now become part of a society where the mass media are reduced to self-censoring impotence, Soviet style. |
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Musketeers at tea
Lucy Dallas
200 years on, Alexandre Dumas still has the power to surprise. |
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Büchner lives on
George Steiner
Dead at twenty-three, a political exile, Georg Büchner's artistic resurrection "is as miraculous as are his creations". There is now little doubt of his genius. |
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Elizabeth Gaskell's resurrection
Heather Glen
Having long occupied "a sort of secondary classical rank", Mrs Gaskell is slowly beginning to be revalued as a novelist -
not merely as a charming sentimentalist, but as shrewd, observant and perceptive - a serious craftswoman. |
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Dante on drugs
Peter Hainsworth
Did Dante and his associates really give their visionary and dreamlike imaginings a boost with the stimulus of love-potions? |
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Luxury Camus
Robin Buss
Car crashes and other deaths in a sumptuous new edition of the complete works. |
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The afterlife of Victorian fiction
Dinah Birch
The Elementary Education Act of 1870 represented a "high-water mark for the popularity of reading". But many of the writers of that period have disappeared from the literary radar. |
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Are all of them by Shakespeare?
Brian Vickers
Oxford's second edition of The Complete Works still shows a flagrant disregard for the integrity of the canon |
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