By Oliver Tearle Finding the time to relax with a good book can be difficult, but there are a few practical steps you can take which might help to increase your book-reading productivity in 2020. We’re sceptical of lists which promise ‘sure-fire ways to guarantee you’ll read more this year’, […]
Tag: Reading
A Highly Readable History of What It Means to Read
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new short history of literacy and reading by Belinda Jack For Rene Descartes, ‘Reading all the great books is like a conversation with the most honourable people of earlier centuries who were their authors’, while for John […]
A Study in Smallness: Richard Matheson’s The Shrinking Man
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a science-fiction classic Many of Richard Matheson’s narratives focus on lonely men. It was Matheson who wrote the screenplay for an early Steven Spielberg film, Duel (1971), which was based on one of Matheson’s own short stories. Like […]
Michael Moorcock’s Dorian Hawkmoon: Fast-Paced Fantasy
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revisits the deftly plotted fantasy novels of Michael Moorcock It’s not as well-known as it should be that C. S. Lewis nominated his fellow Inkling, J. R. R. Tolkien, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. In 1961, the Chronicles […]
Flaxman Low: The First Psychic Detective
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle investigates the Victorian world of a neglected ‘psychic detective’ The popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, published in The Strand magazine from 1891 until the 1920s, led to many imitators. As well as such creations as […]