The Essay

Essays on the underappreciated aspects of well known pieces of culture. Writer Sarfraz Manzoor describes a moment from the film Field of Dreams and what it means to him.

It’s in the minutiae of masterpieces that we feel their thrill and power. In this series of The Essay, five leading cultural voices choose a great work of art and talk about a small, underappreciated aspect of the piece that carries great meaning for them. Spectator Literary Editor Sam Leith explores his fascination with a background figure in Judith Kerr’s classic picture book ‘The Tiger Who Came...

Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. In this essay, he focuses on Joan Williams and her novel Old Powder. After her first novel was shortlisted for the National Book Award, thi...

Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. In this essay, he focuses on Philip Roth. Roth became permanently alienated from American Jews and even his own mother asked him if he was...

Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. In this essay, he focuses on Norman Mailer. His reputation as a novelist had gone down the toilet before he reinvented himself with the non...

Michael Goldfarb looks at five authors and their books on the receiving end of cancel culture in liberal America of the 1960s. Each author and the work being discussed was the subject of a controversy that altered their lives and deeply affected their careers. This essay looks at Amiri Baraka previously known as LeRoi Jones. He was seen as a genuine heir to James Baldwin. A decade younger than Bal...

The 1960s are celebrated for the paradigm shift in American society. This shift was reflected in art and culture as well as politics. But these great changes were not accomplished without controversy. Even in the most slow-flowing art form, literature, great controversies burst out that are now forgotten, but they anticipate what is going on with today's cancel culture. They occurred without the m...

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Roy McFarlane is revealing secrets about the area of Bilston in the Black Country. His focus is on Big Lizzy, an enormous blast furnace that dominated the skyline of the Black Country for decades. And also the black-owned Rising Star Night Club and Major's iconic Bilston chip shop. Roy was born in Birmingham...

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. R.M. Francis is sharing the secret world of Wren’s Nest in Dudley. Once a site of intense mining, this was the UK’s first urban nature reserve. It’s world-famous geologically for its well-preserved Silurian coral reef fossils and is considered the most diverse and abundant fossil site in the British Isles. Su...

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Brendan Hawthorne is revealing his hidden childhood world of Tipton. Think cooling towers, high-rise flats, scrapyard cranes and angel fish in the canal. Brendan is a poet, playwright, writer and musician who was born in Tipton in the Black Country. He’s released five collections of poetry and had two plays p...

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Emma Purshouse is introducing a new visitor to St Barts Church which stands on the hill in Wednesbury. Think cock fights, an unimpeded wind from the Urals and orange chips. Emma was born in Wolverhampton and is a freelance writer, novelist and performance poet. She’s a poetry slam champion and performs regula...

Writers choose a Black Country scene to reveal something of this strangely hidden region. Poet Liz Berry is taking a nighttime drive to the top of a hill in the Black Country to visit the ghosts of her childhood in Sedgley. Liz’s first book of poems, Black Country, a ‘sooty, soaring hymn to her native West Midlands’ (Guardian) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, received a Somerset Maugham A...

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. In this final essay of the series, Geoff Dyer retraces a pilgrimage to New Mexico, where DH Lawrence’s ashes were supposedly built into a concrete shrine near Taos at the request of his estranged wife Frieda. But were they actually his ashes? Dyer is a multi-aw...

Five writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Brandon Taylor travels uptown through a racially-charged Manhattan to Harlem, where Langston Hughes is buried in a library - literally underneath his prophetic words. Taylor is a New York-based fiction writer and essayist originally from Alabama. His nove...

Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Helen Mort ventures up a Yorkshire hill to find Sylvia Plath’s much-vandalised gravestone, a battleground for those claiming the American poet's contested legacy. Born in Sheffield, Mort is an award-winning poet and novelist. Producer: Ciaran Berming...

Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today Tracy Chevalier strolls to Stinsford, the Dorset village where Thomas Hardy’s heart is poetically buried separately from his body at Poets' Corner, Westminster – echoing the writer’s divided self. Chevalier was born in America but now lives in Hardy'...

Five more writers go on five reflective, restorative and often playful journeys in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes. Today in the first essay of a new series, Naomi Alderman goes in search of Mary Wollstonecraft's tomb in Old St Pancras churchyard - reputedly the spot where, among other things, Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary Shelley learnt to write. She sheds light on th...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...

Jerry Brotton listens for the voices and tells the stories of the ‘other Tudors’: ten men and women from across the world that lived, worked, worshipped and died in Tudor England. The popular fascination with the Tudors tends to concentrate on the lives of white, elite, English-born men (and the occasional woman). But Tudor England also saw Muslims, Jews, Africans and Native Americans come and go...