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1911
Yeats’ tribute to his dead friend opens dramatically with the riots that greeted Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. Yeats argues against picturesque, trivial or declamatory...
Read Essay1810
The essay in which Wordsworth uttered the Romantic Biographer’s credo: that commemoration is ‘truth hallowed by love’, truth ‘of the highest order’, even if it glosses ov...
Read Essay1926
A piece both prophetic and self-consciously of its time. Woolf begins disparagingly: the art of making movies is still too young and banal; we are savages knocking together saxopho...
Read Essay1797
A year before Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, Wollstonecraft defines the Romantic Poet. Beginning like a periodical piece, laughing at how city people go to the country but don...
Read Essay1891
A mock-Socratic dialogue, in which ‘Vivian’ reads ‘Cyril’ highlights from a longer article. Vivian argues that Art expresses only itself and serves no other end, while Life...
Read Essay1956
Despite her affinity with feline independence, intelligence and elegance, West owned a cat only late in life and this arch but tender piece is the result. Full of gentle, ...
Read Essay1943
Distinguishing between the soul’s cry ‘Why am I being hurt?’ and the superficial cry ‘Why has somebody else got more than I have?’, Weil argues that the best society is a...
Read Essay1993
The most intellectual yet unpretentious essay on the cultural impact of television – a crater so huge we forget we stand in it. Foster Wallace begins with a Walter Benjaminesque ...
Read Essay2005
Originating in a fiercely satirical protest sent by a Kenyan-born author to the editors of Granta, this essay has turned Wainaina into the unofficial ‘censor’ of white writing...
Read Essay1961
This profile of jazz trumpeter Miles Davis begins with musical history and critique, then describes ‘Miles in the flesh’: his extreme egotism and disdain for the British, yet t...
Read Essay1862
Aiming ‘to speak a word for Nature’, this essay saunters and surveys, with playful lateral logic. Thoreau’s wide-ranging allusions raise the piece above the spontaneous musin...
Read Essay1729
This is an anti-colonialist satire, in the style of Juvenal or Tertullian, sarcastically suggesting that the solution to Irish poverty is for the Catholics to sell their children a...
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