You should not use the word love lightly. Love, about a person, means that every inch of them delights you, even the parts that also cause you pain or terror. It means you care about their flourishing; their way of seeing is dear to you; you want to stroke their hair and serve them cocoa; their words take up residence in your mind and rearrange the furniture. I am confident in pronouncing that people will love the first volume of Philip Pullman’s trilogy, The Book of Dust, with the same helpless vehemence that stole over them when The Golden Compass came out in the mid-’90s, or even when they first met their partners or held their newborn children. Pullman, now 70 and living in Oxford with his wife, a teacher, is simply one of the best storytellers to wave his hand over English literature. La Belle Sauvage (the first installment of this series set in the same dusky and glimmering multiverse as His Dark Materials, a world largely mute since 2000’s The Amber Spyglass) excites a specific enthrallment that is all the headier for being familiar. The Book of Dust is love—nostalgic, warming, pure—at first mote. Continue reading at 'Slate'
[ Slate | 2017-10-19 00:00:00 UTC ]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines a famous phrase derived from Shakespeare The old line about Hamlet, that it’s ‘too full of quotations’, wittily sums up the play’s influence on not just English literature but on the everyday language we use. Many of us... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-05-29 14:00:47 UTC ]
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Guest Blogger: Prof Katy Shaw, University of Northumbria, Vice-Chair of BACLS – the British Association of Literary Studies – and executive committee member of University English, the national subject association. In recent years there has been a rapid rise in the teaching of English Literature... Continue reading at British Council global
[ British Council global | 2020-05-18 09:30:54 UTC ]
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Jeremy Trafford, who has died aged 85 after contracting Covid-19, was a publisher, teacher and writer. I met him in the late 1970s, while supply teaching at the London Oratory school, in west London, where he taught English literature in the sixth form. He was a brilliant teacher, who inspired... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-05-05 11:07:04 UTC ]
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When we think of poems, these days most people probably automatically think of lyric poems: usually quite short poems which describe the poet’s (or an imagined speaker’s) thoughts and feelings. But from the epic poems of Homer to the Border Ballads of the Middle Ages to notable contemporary... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-04-29 14:00:40 UTC ]
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Literary criticism (or even ‘literary theory’) goes back as far as ancient Greece, and Aristotle’s Poetics. But the rise of English Literature as a university subject, at the beginning of the twentieth century, led to literary criticism focusing on English literature – everything from... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-04-15 14:00:07 UTC ]
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The eight shortlists for the British Book Awards have been revealed with heavyweights Margaret Atwood, Bernardine Evaristo, Philip Pullman and David Walliams all in the running for the Book of the Year accolades. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-20 00:59:33 UTC ]
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The sestina form is thought to have been created by Provencal troubadours – and possibly by one specific troubadour, Arnaut Daniel – in around 1200. However, it didn’t arrive in English literature until the late 1570s, when both Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, poets at the court of Queen... Continue reading at Interesting Literature
[ Interesting Literature | 2020-03-04 15:00:47 UTC ]
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Philip Pullman and Jackie Morris have donated to a £14,000 crowdfunding campaign for the New Welsh Review after the literary magazine saw its funding slashed by 20% last year. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2020-03-03 23:24:10 UTC ]
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Below is the text of the 2020 Clark Lecture in English Literature instituted by Trinity College, Cambridge. * Thank you for inviting me to deliver this, the Clark Lecture, now in its 152nd year. When I received the invitation, I scrolled down the list of previous speakers, the many “Sirs” and... Continue reading at Literrary Hub
[ Literrary Hub | 2020-02-12 09:49:50 UTC ]
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“But her emails.” Following the 2016 presidential election, those words entered American media lore as shorthand for one of the most grievous errors made by the press in its coverage of the campaign: that it overhyped Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to balance out Donald Trump’s... Continue reading at Columbia Journalism Review
[ Columbia Journalism Review | 2020-01-28 13:08:46 UTC ]
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The novelist on William Blake, crying through Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and an insightful poem about teenage masturbationBorn in Bury, Greater Manchester, in 1978, Emma Jane Unsworth studied English literature at the University of Liverpool and received an MA from Manchester University’s... Continue reading at The Guardian
[ The Guardian | 2020-01-26 10:00:20 UTC ]
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Lee Child’s Blue Moon has boomeranged back into the Weekly E-Book Ranking top spot, a week after Philip Pullman’s collected His Dark Materials sensationally knocked the 24th Jack Reacher title from the number one. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-12-06 08:47:34 UTC ]
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Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, collated into a single e-book, has subtly knifed Lee Child in the back to claim the Weekly E-Book Ranking number one. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-11-29 09:51:32 UTC ]
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Tom Fickling finds himself the publisher of one of the UK’s most successul authors and a partner of the world’s largest trade book publisher. The post The UK’s Tom Fickling, a ‘Sudden’ Publisher of Philip Pullman appeared first on Publishing Perspectives. Continue reading at Publishing Perspectives
[ Publishing Perspectives | 2019-11-07 06:30:54 UTC ]
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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine EvaristoSince studying Lara as a student, I have been a fan of Bernardine Evaristo’s work, and am delighted to see her win the Booker Prize this year. Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of twelve black characters with different backgrounds and experiences, most... Continue reading at British Council global
[ British Council global | 2019-10-30 09:49:28 UTC ]
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The second in the Book of Dust Trilogy is lengthy but worth the time investment. Continue reading at The Washington Post
[ The Washington Post | 2019-10-21 23:55:57 UTC ]
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Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth (Penguin/David Fickling) has maintained its number one spot in the Amazon Charts' Most-Sold: Fiction top 20 for a second week, while the current UK Official Top 50 number one through Nielsen BookScan's TCM, Bill Bryson's The Body (Transworld), also held... Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-10-15 17:51:08 UTC ]
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Philip Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth (Penguin/David Fickling) has soared 15 places to top the Amazon Charts Most-Sold: Fiction chart, in the same week it sold 54,301 copies in hardback through Nielsen BookScan's TCM. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-10-09 20:59:35 UTC ]
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Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth (Penguin/David Fickling) has knocked Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Chatto & Windus) from the UK Official Top 50 number one spot, selling 54,301 copies in its first three days on sale. Continue reading at The Bookseller
[ The Bookseller | 2019-10-08 06:04:30 UTC ]
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Interviews Carolyne Larrington Audible’s new fiction podcast, Hag, launching August 29, features eight reimaginings of traditional British folktales by eight contemporary female writers, with folktales chosen from across the UK. The collection will be... Continue reading at World Literature Today
[ World Literature Today | 2019-08-30 14:21:50 UTC ]
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