Latest posts
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Robinson Crusoe: The First English Novel and the Self-Made Man
In 1719 a sixty-year-old Londoner with a long career as a merchant, a spy, a pamphleteer, and a bankrupt published a book whose full title ran to a…
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Alice in Wonderland: The Logic of Nonsense
On a golden afternoon in July 1862, a shy Oxford mathematics don named Charles Lutwidge Dodgson took the three young daughters of the college dean rowing…
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The Birth of Science Fiction: From Frankenstein to Wells
Science fiction has no founding charter and no single birthday, but it has a remarkably tight gestation. In a span of roughly eighty years — from a rainy…
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Tom Sawyer and the Lost World of American Boyhood
Mark Twain called The Adventures of Tom Sawyer “a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air.” It is a revealing thing to say about a book that…
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Oscar Wilde: The Wit, the Plays, and the Trial That Ruined Him
Oscar Wilde spent his career insisting that the mask tells more truth than the face. “Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth,” he wrote; the…
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Fu-Manchu and the ‘Yellow Peril’: Reading a Problematic Classic
There is a particular kind of cowardice in pretending a book does not exist, and a different kind in pretending it is harmless. Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu…
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Jekyll and Hyde: The Double and the Divided Self
Everyone knows the secret of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde before they open it. The title has become a figure of speech, the twist a permanent…
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Pollyanna and the Cult of Optimism
There are not many novels whose protagonist has been demoted to a common noun, and fewer still where the demotion counts as an insult. To call someone a…
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Treasure Island: The Map That Invented the Pirate
Almost everything you picture when you imagine a pirate was invented by one man, in one book, and several of the details began as a joke between a father…
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The Last of the Mohicans: Cooper and the Frontier Myth
James Fenimore Cooper subtitled The Last of the Mohicans “A Narrative of 1757,” and the date is the first thing worth pausing on. He published the book in…