This lecture compares West Indian writers Derek Walcott and Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul on their attitudes towards history and myth. They are often considered opposites: not just rivals, but respectively a mythopoeic poet and a mythoclastic prose writer. This lecture finds that in their attitudes to the painful presence and painful absences of Caribbean history, and to the dangerous and helpful ways in which myth can deal with these, the two writers have far more in common than has been recognised.
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- ‘The Young Russian’: D.H. Lawrence, London’s Russians, and the First World War
- Resisting Tragedy: A Report on the International D.H. Lawrence Conference, Paris, 2018
- Lawrence, Dostoevsky, and the Last Temptation by Christ
- Lawrence’s Hampstead: A Walking Tour
- Lawrence’s Bloomsbury: Two Walking Tours
- ‘The Merry-Go-Round’ and ‘The Night of the Zeppelins’
- London in D.H. Lawrence’s Words
- Climbing Down the Alpine Pisgah: Lawrence and the Alps
- The Alps in D.H. Lawrence’s Thought and Theology
- Paint, Pain, and Fiction: Beryl Bainbridge’s ‘Master Georgie’ and Michael Frayn’s ‘Headlong’
- Henry James and Ivan Turgenev: Cosmopolitanism and Croquet
- What is ‘Comparative’ Literature?
- The Russian Soul Englished
- Commentaries on Shakespeare’s Sonnets 88-93
- ‘The Mill on the Floss’ in the Nineteen-Seventies
- The Unconscious Good Life in ‘Women in Love’ and ‘Anna Karenina’
- Scapegoating, Double-Plotting, and the Justice of ‘Anna Karenina’
- War and Peace in Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’
- Why does Daniel Deronda’s Mother live in Russia?
- ‘Daniel Deronda’ as Tragi-Comedy
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- Finding ‘God’ in DH Lawrence’s Poetry
- DH Lawrence and Brexit
- DH Lawrence and the Anticipation of a Vegan World
- Revisiting Tolstoy’s ‘On Shakespeare and on Drama’
- Lawrence, Darwin and Genre
- How is Studying English Transformational?
- The Torture Debate, ’24’, and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’
- Are DH Lawrence’s ‘Pansies’ Poetry?
- D.H. Lawrence and Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor’s Christ
- Screening ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ in 2015
- Russia in Twenty-First Century Fiction
- Anglo-German Relations and D.H. Lawrence’s ‘All of Us’
- Howard Jacobson and Anti-Semitism
- Describing the Unobserved: Literature and the World without Humans
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- Review of ‘The Daughter-in-Law’, Arcola Theatre, London, January 2019
- Review of ‘The Theatre of D.H. Lawrence’ by James Moran
- Review of the Belknap Press ‘Annotated Wuthering Heights’
- LAWRENCE: Scandalous! Censored! Banned!
- D.H. Lawrence Homo Religiosus
- Rosa Newmarch: Russophile and Poet
- Lawrence’s ‘Women in Love’ on the Small Screen
- Modernism in our Time: Review of Roger Griffin’s ‘Fascism and Modernism’
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- Julian Barnes’s ‘A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters’
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- Multiple Plotting
- Chapters: Why Writers Have Them, and How To Read Them
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- D.H. Lawrence 7: Reception History
- D.H. Lawrence 6: Birds, Beasts and Children
- D.H. Lawrence 5: The Alps
- D.H. Lawrence 4: The World at Large
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- Old and New Testament Ethics in Two Lloyd Webber Musicals
- Review of ‘Mud and Stars’, a Russian Literary Travel Book by Sara Wheeler
- Literary Bad Sex
- Review of Geoff Dyer’s selection of DH Lawrence’s Essays ‘Life with a Capital L’
- Review of ‘Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter’
- Radio 4 ‘The Art of Intimacy’ interview
- Radio 4 ‘Front Row’ Interview about DH Lawrence’s ‘The Daughter-in-Law’
- Review of ‘Kolyma Stories’, Varlam Shamalov
- Tribute to Tolstoy
- World War II and Memory
- Loving Fictions: Why Do We Fall in Love with Fictional Characters?
- Carnivore: Dorian Gray Meets Trainspotting
- Review of ‘Jonathan Swift: The Reluctant Rebel’
- Anglo-Greek Arcadia and Me
- Is there a distortion in the perception of Russian literature in the English-speaking cultures?
- Five Books by D.H. Lawrence
- Teffi from Odessa to Paris
- An Orgy of Revenge in a Man’s World
- Marriage a la Mode
- Reader, I married him
- The Unintended Consequences of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’
- On Script Consulting for BBC1’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover
- Review of Nabokov’s Letters to His Wife
- D.H. Lawrencians in Gargnano 2014
- Why to – and how to – read Anna Karenina today
- Review of ‘Behind the Mask: the Life of Vita Sackville-West’ by Matthew Dennison
- Review of ‘Subtly Worded’ by Teffi
- Review of ‘The Kreutzer Sonata Variations’, trans. and ed. Michael R. Katz
- Review of ‘The Dog’ by Joseph O’Neill
- Review of Rosamund Bartlett’s translation of ‘Anna Karenina’
- Review of CUP’s DH Lawrence Poems, and Richard Owen’s Lady Chatterley’s Villa
- ‘Broad range of GCSE literature choices are essential for a full education’
- Mountains of the Mind: How Russian Writers Saw the Caucasus
- Summits and Lovers: Retracing the Footsteps of DH Lawrence in the Alps
- BBC 1 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 2015
- Journey Without Shame
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