Blog

  • Semantic Escalation

    Charlie Ellis writes: The English lexicon is famously hospitable. Much to the chagrin of prescriptivist sticklers, it is a language that greets new arrivals with open arms. We are accustomed to technological neologisms like ‘doomscrolling’, ‘podcast’, and ‘vibe coding’ and track them with the obsessive energy of a birder spotting a rare migrant.

  • A Political Exile

    Thomas McCarthy writes: A poet and former director of Poetry Ireland, Theo Dorgan has already written a number of successful prose works, including ‘Voyage Home’, his marvellous logbook of an ocean voyage from Antigua to Kinsale on the seventy-foot schooner ‘Spirit of Crosshaven’.

  • Yes We Can

    John Fanning writes: Earlier this year I saw the film ‘Mountainhead’, the new Jesse Armstrong production continuing his exposure of the rich and powerful following the success of the Murdoch family saga ‘Succession’. The characters featured are all filthy rich tech bros, some easily identified: Musk, possibly Sam Altman.

  • Getting in Close

    Josh Abbey writes: Essays about close reading often begin with a cliche: IA Richards and his experiment. Soon the formula will include a disquisition on AI: can a large-language model close-read? I asked ChatGPT and it said ‘sort of’. So I asked CoPilot, and it said ‘Absolutely!’ It was a little shy and reticent to…

  • A Pinch of Salt

    David Blake Knox writes: A literary storm raged during this summer. The eye of that storm could be found in the UK, but it concerned a book that has been an international multi-million bestseller. The book provided the basis of a movie that was released to critical acclaim earlier this year – with the promise…

  • Tom Stoppard: 1937-2025

    Alena Dvořáková writes: Writing means turning things into words. But when is it too soon to turn people into words? When the dead are prolific, hugely successful writers, this worry is easier to dismiss. After all, they have made a lifetime career out of turning things as well as people into words incessantly, obsessively and,…

  • A Troubled Shore

    David Alvey writes: Some books become more relevant with the passage of time. Dervla Murphy’s A Month by the Sea, which relates the author’s experiences in Gaza during the month of June 2011, when she was eighty years old, is such a book. Her visit took place less than half a year after Israel’s twenty-two-day…

  • Move over for AI

    Katja Bruisch writes: I recently completed a scholarly monograph – an environmental, economic and energy history of peat in imperial and Soviet Russia. After years of thinking and writing, I approached Cambridge University Press. CUP is a leading academic press and their series Studies in Environment and History has a high reputation in my field….

  • To Algiers and Back

    Hiram Morgan writes: In Holy Trinity, a white Moorish-style church built in the late nineteenth century overlooking the port of Algiers, there is a memorial to Devereux Spratt, the first Anglican minister to come to the great African city. Reverend Spratt didn’t however arrive of his own free will – he was a captive of…