Book Review: The Indian in the Cupboard.
If you are taking your government-permitted exercise in the south of Edinburgh these days, you will sometimes see boxes of …
Category Archives: Literary Review
Book Review: Catch-22.
For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic will make death come alive again. With the escalating fatalities and the decimation of …
World War Correspondents: Tietjens, Crouchback and Yossarian.
[When I began researching “World War Correspondents” in 2013, it was with the intention of writing a series of articles …
Book Review: Flights.
Jasmine, the nice Muslim woman I’d spent the whole evening talking to, was telling me about her project: she wanted …
Book Review: Harry Price, The Psychic Detective.
Harry Price was a notorious psychic investigator who had haunted the UK’s tabloid newspapers, and wreaked endless mischief on them, …
Short Story Review: Robert Spalding’s Ghost Stories.
[The following contains spoilers.] In the dying days of 2019, Robert Spalding got going a new WordPress blog called “A …
Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris versus Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter.
INTRODUCTION. THE INFLUENCE OF THE ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. THE INFLUENCE OF SCHEHERAZADE. THE INFLUENCE OF SAMUEL SMILES’ SELF-HELP. …
Did Bram Stoker Suffer from Fleas?
Academic studies of Bram Stoker’s extraordinary vampire novel Dracula (1897) are today like so much landfill. Modernists and postmodernists, Freudians …
Reading Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris in light of The One Thousand and One Nights.
Eugène Sue’s serialised crime novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842-3) begins with a device that had been treasured by contributors …
Book Review: Mindf*ck.
Christopher Wylie is this bratty young Canadian guy with the pink lid who had “blown the whistle” on the Vote …
Book Review: The False River.
Nick Holdstock predominantly writes nonfiction about China, a society that he has explored as an English teacher, though his debut …
Christmas with Washington Irving.
Today the Christmas material in Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20) encompasses a jovial and expansive midsection …
Putting a Value on Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris.
The central plot-line… is that of a mystery-of-kinship story whose basic literary shape derives from the mystery-romances of Gothic and …
Am I a Liberal? (or, a Book Review of Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities).
Am I a liberal? This might sound like a peculiar question because surely everybody is these days. Even most self-proclaimed …
Book Review: The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies.
[In taking all of the quotes in this review from an e-book facsimile of The Secret Commonwealth, I have switched …
