It’s one of the most famous concepts in fiction: the idea of the dual personality. Robert Louis Stevenson cannot take the credit for inventing it – Edgar Allan Poe and Dostoyevsky had both written tales about ‘the double’ in the 1840s, some forty years before Stevenson put pen to paper […]
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The Shortest…
The shortest play in the world is probably by Samuel Beckett. ‘Breath’ is a 1969 work that was specially written for the theatrical revue Oh! Calcutta! The revue was organised by theatre critic Kenneth Tynan and brought together a host of famous people, including John Lennon and Sam Shepard. The […]
Frankenstein: The Most Misread Novel?
Start with the basics: there is a world of difference between Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel Frankenstein and the countless films that have been inspired by it. Even Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 adaptation, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, adds much to Shelley’s original vision and in doing so takes much away. Its title […]
Peter Pan in Neverland
In which book did Peter Pan first appear, and what was the target readership of the book? Peter Pan, the play for children? Think again. The boy who wouldn’t grow up first appeared, ironically, in a book for adults, a little-known 1902 novel called The Little White Bird. However, it […]
Literature and Sex
In one sense, ‘sex’ didn’t exist until 1899, when H. G. Wells first used it in his novel Love and Mr Lewisham as an abbreviation for ‘sexual intercourse’ (and Wells would know: his string of lovers was long and illustrious, including the feminist writer Rebecca West and the modernist pioneer Dorothy […]