Culture

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

The sonnet machine

A sonnet contains an emotional drama of illusion and deception, crisis and resolution, crafted to make us think and feel

Timothy Hampton

Leaf through Shakespeare’s First Folio for a riveting journey into theatre history

13 minutes

The key to a vampire’s immortality? Meeting the anxieties of the moment

15 minutes

The honesty of pornography

Often vilified as a weapon of male supremacy, pornography in fact has much to tell us about ourselves and our culture

Kathleen Lubey

Was Colin Wilson a fascist?

For thousands of fans, he made philosophy thrillingly relevant. Yet there is a deep unsavoury undercurrent to his worldview

Jules Evans

Leave them alone

Parenting advice from D H Lawrence: don’t smother your children with love. They are more sagacious than you think

Lara Feigel