Culture

Her blazing world

Margaret Cavendish’s boldness and bravery set 17th-century society alight, but is she a feminist poster-girl for our times?

Francesca Peacock

On Jewish revenge

What might a people, subjected to unspeakable historical suffering, think about the ethics of vengeance once in power?

Shachar Pinsker

Robert Frost’s poetic reflection on youth, as read in his unforgettable baritone

5 minutes

Do liberal arts liberate?

In Jack London’s novel, Martin Eden personifies debates still raging over the role and purpose of education in American life

Nick Romeo

Terrifying vistas of reality

H P Lovecraft, the master of cosmic horror stories, was a philosopher who believed in the total insignificance of humanity

Sam Woodward

The real Miss Julie

Victoria Benedictsson assumed a male identity, achieved literary stardom, and took her own life. Then Strindberg stole it

Elisabeth Åsbrink

The best stories smell

When scents are used to intensify a narrative, they heighten young readers’ emotions and enrich their memory banks

Natalia Kucirkova

Saved by Infinite Jest

Bereft and suicidal, I lay on my sofa. Only David Foster Wallace’s novel kept me tethered to life, and still does

Mala Chatterjee

Citizens

Devon, 1970s: I’m a rector’s son, hanging out with Boz the biker. My life is about to open up – what does it promise for him?

Tim Pears

A French Creole folktale nearly lost to time is given new, gorgeously animated life

6 minutes

Vergil’s secret message

Long derided as mere coincidences, acrostics in ancient poetry are finally being taken seriously – with astonishing results

Julia Hejduk

Myths from Earth’s edge – what the Icelandic sagas reveal about Norse morality

57 minutes

Poet of impermanence

Enheduana is the first known named author. Her poems of strife and upheaval resonate in our own unstable times

Sophus Helle

Solace and saudade

In the face of an inscrutable, indifferent universe, Pessoa suggests we cultivate a certain longing for the elusive horizon

Jonardon Ganeri & Sarah Seymour

The diaries of Kafka

By day an insurance official, by night he was an incessant, insomniacal scribe of the space between waking and dreaming

Ross Benjamin

What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?

10 minutes