FANTASTIC FICTION – Escapes to other places and other times

‘Dark Academia’ (12 of the best dark academia books of all time) is a genre of fiction attracting a lot of attention. Its aesthetic centres on higher education, traditional lifestyles, Gothic architecture, ancient art and poetry, classical literature, elite college life, psychological manipulation, and the embrace of darkness. To try out this genre reach for […]

It is early June 2025 and the headline news covers a spat between the world’s richest man and the the world’s most powerful man (Opinion | Musk and Trump’s Twitter Fight Reveals How Power Works Today – POLITICO). It is not edifying. Comparison with the finer specimens of humanity in its history speaks to another

The theme of this book is how best to educate a child. The subject’s mother deserts her husband, leaving young Richard behind. The boy is brought up by his father, Sir Austin Feverel, on strict educational principles. Being secluded at home and subjected to this regime does not prevent Richard falling in love with Lucy

This story covers the period from 1957 to 1953. The setting is rural Mississippi, a landscape of baked clay and shacks with cinder yards. It relates the redneck poverty of David whose father drifts from job to job. Respectable folk shun the family because they cannot afford to pay church dues. When the father dies

Published 47 years after the death of its author, this unique collection of short, aphoristic paragraphs offers itself as the autobiography of Bernardo Soares, one of Pessoa’s alternate selves. Part intimate diary, part prose poetry, part descriptive narrative, the work is beautifully translated by Richard Zenith in the Penguin Classics edition. Fernando Pessoa (Fernando Pessoa

Robert Stone (Robert Stone obituary | Books | The Guardian) offered Outerbridge Reach in 1992 as his fifth novel. A rich business man with playboy tendencies enters a round-the-world sailing race to promote a new design of yacht his firm has developed. After a financial scandal his place is taken by Owen Browne, a salesman

Don DeLillo (Don DeLillo: ‘I wondered what would happen if power failed everywhere’ | Don DeLillo | The Guardian) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as consumerism, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, television, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics,

The film Conclave (Conclave (2024) – IMDb) is being shown in cinemas in December 2024. It is a mystery thriller directed by Edward Berger and written by Peter Straughan based on the 2016 novel by Robert Harris (Robert Harris: “Great politicians are like novelists” – New Statesman). The film stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, and Isabella Rossellini. In the film, Cardinal

Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784, Denis Diderot (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)) was a French man of letters and philosopher who, from 1745 to 1772, served as chief editor of the Encyclopédie, one of the principal works of the Age of Enlightenment. In this novel of 1796 the servant Jacques rides through France with his master. He appears to act as though