Close Readings

What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fiction? In Dag Solstad’s Shyness and Dignity (1994), a middle-aged teacher, Elias Rukla, is teaching Ibsen’s The Wild Duck for perhaps the hundredth time when he has a revelation about an apparently insignificant detail in the play...

In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many of the large number who made their hopeful journey to the capital from all over the country in the 18th century, life was more likely to end up like a scene from a Hogarth print, ruined by gin and despair. London had become a ‘gr...

In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as the job required. He immediately embarked on some European travel and the following year found himself in Rome during the short-lived republican uprising against the Pope, led by Giuseppe Mazzini. Out of these experiences came Amour...

‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilificat...

‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as their focus has shifted from biology to society. Its authors, Sam Moore and Alex Roberts, are both anti-fascist researchers writing explicitly from the activist left. Unlike commentators such as Mark Lilla, who worry about ‘vilificat...

When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with which he painted’. The loss of an arm was hardly wonderful for Mr Lloyd, but for the girls at the centre of the novel it is a rich source of fascination, and Spark’s description exemplifies her use of one of the classic realist t...

The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least for the energy and locations it provided for two great booms in London life: financial speculation and a genuinely public print culture. For this episode, Rosemary is joined by Markman Ellis, professor of 18th-century studies at Q...

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me as a kind of dream’, Browning recalled. ‘I had to write it then and there, and I finished it the same day.’ The result, inspired by a line spoken by Edgar (as Poor Tom) in Act III of King Lear, is a grim, hallucinat...

Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the species depicted by the artist John James Audubon, who lived in the area. Emily Raboteau’s ‘Lessons for Survival’ (2024) takes these murals, along with Raboteau’s own photographs of local birds, as a way into exploring the challenges...

If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable narrator, Nabokov’s novel is a model of postmodernism. Yet for all its playfulness, the book maintains, in its powers of noticing and subtle emotional intelligence, a strong commitment to the real. To examine the debts to realism...

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founded and the West End, with its squares, parks and fashionable ‘season’, was born. But the social whirl stopped abruptly in 1665 with the arrival of plague, which was followed in 1666 by the catastrophic Great Fire of London. To talk...

According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats found himself in Chichester on that day in 1819, he was inspired to write his own account. In this episode, Seamus and Mark discuss Keats’s talent for sublime banality, the competing readings of the lover, Porphyro, and the poem's r...

In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into the vicarages of middle England. In this episode, McCarthy joins Thomas Jones to discuss Eliot’s radical masterpiece, which marks a revolution in English fiction as significant in its way as the political, scientific and industria...

At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into decline, as a fifty-year drought may have helped to push the settlement to collapse. ‘How is it that a complex society like Chaco could survive one drought but not another?’ Roy Scranton asks near the start of ‘Impasse: Climate C...

‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise details, the free indirect style and the use of leitmotif all reveal Bellow as a keen student of Flaubert and the 19th-century realists. Yet his novella about a disastrous day in the life of the sloppy, jobless 44-year-old Tommy Wil...

When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Catholics who tried to blow him and half of Westminster up in 1605. But the plot failed, and with James’s reign came a new, lavish court life, the emergence of the first newspapers amid the booming print industry around St Paul’s, a...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘one of the most beautiful poems in the language’. Like ‘Michael’ (1800), it depicts the disintegration of ordinary lives under social and psychological pressures, reflecting Wordsworth’s interest in rural poverty as much as the nat...

Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, to support ‘mutual flourishing’ between humans and the environment. Braiding Sweetgrass was an enormous success for a small press publication, becoming a bestseller and a touchstone for readers searching for alternatives to extract...

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably didn’t know the work of her contemporary Jean Rhys, but if she had read ‘A Voyage in the Dark’ (1934), she might well have marvelled at, and even envied, its radical realism. Rhys’ story of a young woman who moves from the Caribb...

When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the ready availability of refreshments and the high quality of the players’ clothes. The revolution in playmaking that he witnessed on the south bank of the Thames reflected widespread innovations in London’s cultural life in the reign of...

In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in the dark,’ she wrote, ‘William and Coleridge employing themselves in laying the plan of a ballad.’ This was the origin of the opening poem of the ’Lyrical Ballads’, published the following year – the book often seen as marking th...

The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagined range for self to move in’. In ‘Is a River Alive?’ (2025), Robert Macfarlane travels with the lawyers, Indigenous people, scientists and others who are working to protect rivers in Ecuador, India and Quebec, and challenges him...

In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘the caves shall connect, and each comes to daylight at the present moment’. This was Woolf’s ‘tunnelling process’, a transformative approach that led to the novel's celebrated modernist innovations, with its depiction a group of ci...

At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europe. By the end of Henry VIII’s reign, much of that world had vanished. The Reformation not only changed the religious practices of its inhabitants, it brought a widespread transfer of property that reshaped the character and activi...

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