The Mirror, Tim Bragg, Sycamore Dystopia, 2023, pb., 292pps., £10 Ever since the ancients invented automata, writers have wondered about the implications for humanity, and ruminated about the nature of consciousness. The Industrial Revolution would spawn increasing concern about subservience to machines and “Satanic mills.” The Great War and then Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R…. Continue reading
Post Category → News
The ghost coast
Adam ran his hand over his balding scalp. The dunes shimmered all around – expectant, empty of any movement except his, although he knew rare beetles trundled through rough grass, and he could hear toads, chirring contentedly somewhere amongst orchids and buckthorn. He couldn’t see the sea from here, but it would be far out… Continue reading
Fighting Irish
I have always had a weakness for the Regency period, and a dilettantish interest in dangerous exertion. In Regency Rogue (1976), Patrick Myler tells the story of Dan Donnelly (1788?-1820), one of the most renowned of the bare-knuckle boxers, a sport intimately associated with that rakish period. “No other man”, observes the author, “who ever… Continue reading
Romantic remains
Thomas Jefferson Hogg’s 1813 novel, Memoirs of Prince Alexey Haimatoff, purports to be the reminiscences of a Russian of mysterious, probably royal, parentage. Hogg (1792-1862) wrote on antiquity for both the Edinburgh Review and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but is mostly remembered today as Shelley’s first biographer. They had been friends at Oxford, from which they… Continue reading
Parnassus, and patria
Sunk Island, Holderness. Image: Paul Harrop. Wikimedia Commons Sunken Island: An Anthology of British Poetry Various authors, edited by Alexander Adams, foreword by William Clouston, London: Bournbrook Press, 2022, pb, 55pps, £12.50 Bournbrook Press is an offshoot of Bournbrook Magazine, founded in 2019 to offer a “primarily British audience with traditionalist, socially conservative argument and… Continue reading
Forgetting the past, forging the future
Winds of Change: Britain in the Early Sixties Peter Hennessy, Penguin, 2020, 602 pages, £12.99 Lord Hennessy’s Winds of Change is the last in a trilogy covering the years 1945 – 1965, during which Britain helped win a war but began to lose an empire, and everything altered. The preceding volumes – Never Again: Britain… Continue reading
Heart of the island nation
A Man of Heart Liam Guilar, Swindon: Shearsman Books, 2023, pb., 197pps. The state of modern poetry can be a cause of acrimonious arguments, with critics reprehending poets’ loss of interest in craft, opacity of meaning, and the burgeoning of often McGonagallesque political verse. Liam Guilar demonstrates that at least some modern poets reverence their… Continue reading
Island queendom
The Britannias: An Archipelago’s Tale Alice Albinia, Allen Lane, 2023, hb., 512pps., £25 Islands always intrigue, hovering on the horizons of our imaginations – seen according to lights as territories to be taken, ancient redoubts, repositories of secrets, even loci of lands of youth. Where there are no islands, we often imagine them – Plato’s… Continue reading
The prices of freedom
Obedience is Freedom Jacob Phillips, London: Polity, 2022, pb., 172 pages, £13.55 Johannes Brahms had a personal motto, frei aber froh (‘free but happy’), which features famously as the note sequence F-A♭-F in the first movement of his Third Symphony. He adopted this cheerful philosophy as a jovial riposte to his friend, the violinist Joseph… Continue reading
The imperial imperative
In the Shadow of the Gods: The Emperor in World History Dominic Lieven, London: Allen Lane, 2022, 500 pps. hb., illus., £35 In the battle for precedence between the ‘great man’ and more ‘inclusive’ views of history, an account of emperors across centuries and cultures feels like a defiant assertion of the older school. Cambridge… Continue reading