David Collard on Exorcism by Eugene O’Neill

There’s a moment to savour in the 1930 Marx Brothers comedy Animal Crackers when Groucho flings woo at two wealthy women while wishing he could tell us what he really thinks of them. ‘Pardon me while I have a strange interlude,’ he says, stepping out of the scene to deliver a solemn monologue in a [...]

And the Winner Isn’t…

The Pulitzer board couldn’t decide on a fiction winner, so readers, writers and booksellers are losers. WHAT goes on during a deliberation is a private matter for the jurors alone; the rest of us are privy only to the verdict. That holds true for book awards as well as murder cases. So when the Pulitzer [...]

Marx at 193

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of [...]

Proust and His Mother

There are texts that seem to require a certain craziness of us, a mismeasure of response to match the extravagance of their expression. But can a mismeasure be a match? All we know is that we don’t want to lose or reduce the extravagance but can’t quite fall for it either. An example would be [...]

Odysseus Lies Here?

As the mystery of the exact location of Ithaca in Homer’s epic endures, there might be some inspiration for America today. FOR a nation like ours that is seeking its way home from 10 years of war, maybe there’s a dash of inspiration in the oldest tale of homecoming ever — “The Odyssey” — and [...]

Eric Kandel’s Visions

In 590 BC, to protect her besieged city of Bethulia, the alluring Jewish widow Judith drank with and seduced the attacking Assyrian general Holofernes. When he fell into a drunken, sated heap, she decapitated him with his own sword and displayed his head as trophy, rallying her fellow citizens to rout the Babylonians. So the [...]

500 New Fairytales Discovered in Germany

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian [...]

Why did Ann Romney put Anna Karenina on her Pinterest board?

At this point in an election season, a campaign’s every utterance shimmers with significance. At the same time, this time around, the campaigns have embraced social media. And the social networks, like whiskey, promote disinhibition. (Just ask Anthony Weiner.) Services like Twitter, Facebook and, more recently, the photo-sharing site Pinterest require that we let our [...]

Ingratitude by Charlotte Bronte – LRB

Charlotte Brontë’s ‘L’Ingratitude’, a story written in French for her teacher Constantin Heger, has just been found by Brian Bracken at a museum in Charleroi. A rat, weary of the life of cities, and of courts (for he had played his part in the palaces of kings and in the salons of great lords), a [...]

Jane Austen signed up for Facebook game – The Guardian

Continuing the vogue for modern updates of her fiction, a new Jane Austen game is set to launch on Facebook. Whether players who make their way through a virtual Regency society will suffer the indignity of the social network’s trademark courtship signal of “poking” remains to be seen. The Rogues and Romance game, developed by [...]

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