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Keywords: Shakespeare

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Shakespeare's war criminal? Henry V and the problem of heroism

    • Peter Craven
    • 14 March 2025

    Shakespeare’s Henry V has long been celebrated as a stirring hymn to English valour, a theatrical counterpart to Churchill’s wartime oratory. But beneath its rousing rhetoric lies a darker truth of a king who breaks hearts as easily as he wins battles, a war epic that disguises the brutality it glorifies.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Flesh is a revelation of what fiction can do

    • Peter Craven
    • 07 March 2025

    David Szalay’s Flesh unfolds with quiet, mesmeric intensity, charting a life shaped by desire, disappointment and disaster. As the ordinary shades into the catastrophic, Szalay’s controlled, unshowy prose builds a world of betrayals, longings and subtle devastations, proving, once again, that no one writes the ache of being alive quite like him.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Why did English departments abandon ideas for ideology?

    • Liza Libes
    • 17 January 2025

      In universities worldwide, English departments teach theory rather than literature, using art to serve ideological ends. But how did this happen, and what is lost when we sacrifice moral and cultural depth to the demands of ideological conformity?

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Disclaimer in a streamer world

    • Peter Craven
    • 15 November 2024

    Starring Cate Blanchett at the height of her powers, Disclaimer, the new streamer by Alfonso Cuarón, has already been dubbed the finest thing ever made for the new television, with the director claiming not to have made a serial, but a continuous film. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Sonny Boy: A Memoir by Al Pacino review

    • Peter Craven
    • 08 November 2024

    Al Pacino is an actor we’re inclined to take for granted, given his presence in some of the greatest popular films of the last half century, not least his Michael Corleone in Coppola’s Godfather trilogy, which revealed an actor of extraordinary stature. Sonny Boy is a consistently diverting and illuminating book by a man who has little pomp and circumstance about him. 

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    To give sorrow words

    • Warwick McFadyen
    • 30 September 2024

    The grief of Hamish’s death shaped the words and, slowly, the words shaped the grief. Both shifted a gear in me, and in how the world is viewed. This is natural when an axis is tilted. Some look to grief to be healed, but this, to me, for me, is the wrong word.

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