Oxford University Press

Book Review: Victorian Fairy Tales—Sprites Against Realism

October 30, 2015
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What seems to animate many of the fairy tales is a heady freedom from the constraints of realism.

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Book Review: The Battle of Agincourt Turns 600

October 27, 2015
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Anne Curry’s purpose is not merely to act as a military analyst, but to explore the long cultural history of the battle’s meanings in subsequent British history.

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Book Review: “Napoleon On War” — Might Makes Right, At Least for A While

July 10, 2015
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Bruno Colson’s book is a wonder of research, and serves to shed light on the state of Napoleon’s mind.

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Poetry Review: “The New Oxford Book of War Poetry” — The Duty to Run Mad

April 8, 2015
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Editor Jon Stallworthy’s preference in this superb anthology is for poems that question, or provoke questions about, war.

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Book Review: “Elvis Presley: A Southern Life” — The Same Old Tune

December 17, 2014
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Award-winning historian Joel Williamson would seem to have the credentials to illuminate Elvis as a distinctly Southern phenomenon.

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Book Review: Émile Zola’s “The Conquest of Plassans” — “Tartuffe” Gone Realpolitik

December 5, 2014
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Entertaining yet incisive, The Conquest of Plassans remains a devastatingly acute reminder that religion and politics make surprisingly compatible bedfellows.

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Book Review: “The Witch-Hunt Narrative” — An Ambitious and Disturbing Study of Injustice

September 27, 2014
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The Witch-Hunt Narrative is an extremely important book about an ongoing phenomenon that will not go away anytime soon.

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Poetry Commentary: Thoughts on Reading a New Translation of The Iliad

January 12, 2014
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Powell, the translator, a respected classicist, is noted for promulgating the theory that the Greek alphabet was designed precisely in order to capture epic poetry, provide some approximation of its sounds.

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Book Review: Bringing Nathaniel Hawthorne Home

February 18, 2013
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Unlike fellow apostate (and friend) Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t have the chutzpah to be a proto-existentialist — for him, it was better to cling to questionable moral pieties than plummet into sheer nothingness.

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Book Review: Classic Supernatural Satire — “The Wild Ass’s Skin”

August 15, 2012
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Helen Constantine’s new translation of Balzac’s “The Wild Ass’s Skin” serves this wonderful and weird book well. It is one of the great, black comic fables in world literature, a dazzlingly demented exploration of a society’s lack of imagination.

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