In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads about one of Conan the Barbarian’s literary offspring When I was a teenager devouring every fantasy book I could find, one of my favourite writers was Robert E. Howard. His Conan Chronicles – reprinted by Gollancz in a […]
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 […]
In this excerpt from his fascinating The Book of Forgotten Authors, Christopher Fowler discusses the neglected William Melvin Kelley, author of the remarkable forgotten classic, A Different Drummer ‘If you’re woke, you dig it.’ Well, that answers the question; the word ‘woke’ first appeared in 1962, after William Melvin Kelley said it […]
This week’s classic film review analyses The Running Man, the 1980s dystopian action movie based, and yet also not based, on a Stephen King novel In J. W. Eagan’s sage words, ‘Never judge a book by its movie.’ The following is part of this new monthly ‘literary film review’ segment […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle delves into a range of fascinating literary lists courtesy of Alex Johnson’s new book There is something comforting in a list. The human mind craves order amidst chaos: the inventor of the modern thesaurus (and the one who first […]