Category Archives: Literature

Arts, Books, Education, Literature, Poetry

Book Review: Look Closer

NATIONAL YEAR OF READING

Intro: Published in late 2025, ‘Look Closer: How To Get More Out of Reading’ is the latest work by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a Professor of English Literature at Oxford.

Part memoir, part masterclass, the book is a “love letter” to the act of reading. The author argues that in our age of digital distraction and short-form content, the art of “slow reading” is more vital than ever

In the era of the smart phone and other devices, reading has become a dying art. In 2024, 40 per cent of Britons did not read or listen to a book. More than a third of adults are known to have given up reading for pleasure. In this digital age, it’s easy to see why. Small, compact devices have changed how we read: skimming rather than lingering over language, and the need to look for a quick fix of information.

Today, for too many of us, reading books has become a means to an end. We need to look no further than the armada of self-help authors promising to help you do it more quickly and, by implication, to read more overall. “Read more than 300 pages in one hour,” pledges one. “Speed Reading Faster: Maximise Your Success in Business and Study,” urges another.

The advice from literary artists is simple: ditch the idea that reading faster is better. Various movements have emerged in recent years, trying to help us get more out of life by taking it at a less frenetic pace: slow food, slow work, slow travel, even slow sex. “Slow reading” may sound rather different – the sort of thing that might evoke pity or scorn – but it can help break the bad habits into which many of us have fallen.

As the National Year of Reading is now upon us, there are certain things we can do to reverse the drift.

. Look closer at familiar classics

Some literary works have become so familiar that our eyes slide over them without stopping. But if we slow down our reading, even these works retain the power to surprise us – and to make us look at the world around us in a new and refreshing way.

Take the most famous speech in Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?”

Hamlet’s famous question isn’t carried only by what he says, but by how he says it. That’s because his speech is written in lines of blank verse, 10 syllables long, that repeatedly topple over with an extra 11th syllable – “To be or not to be, that is the quest… ion” – then start again. Over and over, it’s synonymous with someone peering over the edge of a cliff before drawing back. Listening carefully to Hamlet allows us to see life (and death) from his perspective: the rhythm represents the way he’s thinking.

. Linger on little details

Another approach is to look again at a poem that’s often reprinted or published in anthologies – appropriate, since “anthology” literally means “a collection of flowers”:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing Daffodils;

Along the Lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

Wordworth’s ambition was to awaken a more imaginative response to homely or neglected corners of the world, and that aim is captured in the smallest details of his verse. The present participle “dancing” shows how something that happened in the past is still happening in his memory. His line breaks work like double-takes, as he searches for exactly the right word for what he saw: “a crowd / A host”.

Finally, his choice of “host” reveals how he detects a divine presence hovering in the background (angels as the heavenly host), while also suggesting that the sight of all these laughing daffodils has somehow made him feel more at home in the world. It’s another piece of writing that doesn’t give us a set of finished thoughts, but instead introduces us to a different way of thinking.

. Embrace the suggestive and opaque

Some literary works are so brief they function as highly effective training aids for this much more measured approach. For example, there’s a famous short story, often erroneously attributed to Ernest Hemingway, that reads: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That’s it – a tragedy in just six words. Written more than 30 years ago, it is still being thought about today.

Like all the best pieces of writing, it works like an imaginary dumdum bullet: it enters our minds and keeps on expanding. (If you want to discover who the original author was, you’re likely to be disappointed. Versions of this story date back to the early 1900s, and a classified ad reading “For sale: baby carriage, never used” can be found in an American newspaper published in 1883.)

. Ask yourself – or Sherlock – what a good reader is

Some books even contain helpful clues about how to read them. A character such as Sherlock Holmes is a model reader, for instance, because he notices every detail and shows how they combine into a meaningful whole. He sifts life for significance. Take The Boscombe Valley Mystery: Holmes assembles a whole series of tiny clues, including a bit of cigar ash that he establishes is from an Indian cigar, and a boot print that he deduces was made by someone with a limp.

At one point he says to Watson, “you see…”, and although it’s only a passing remark, it also works like a miniature version of the whole story. A literary detective makes us “see”, in the sense of showing us how to use our eyes more carefully, and then makes us “see” in the sense of understanding more about what we’ve just been reading (“Oh, I see!”).

In his 1881 book Daybreak (Morgenröthe), Friedrich Nietzsche explained that he was “a teacher of slow reading”. In an age of work, he wrote, “that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’”, what was needed was an approach that would teach people “how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar”.

Nearly half a century and a half later, slow reading is something we need more than ever. We need to break the habit of reading just for information, on the page as well as online; we must get out of that horrid, uneven rhythm of scanning and skipping.

For when we pick up a book, we aren’t only trying to lose ourselves in it. If we’re willing to look closely enough, and to leave our mental doors ajar, we might find ourselves there.

– Look Closer by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is published by Fern Press, 352pp

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Arts, Books, Culture, Drama, Films, Literature

Hamnet

FILM REVIEW

Intro: This film adaptation is based on Maggie O’Farrell’s deeply moving historical novel that reimagines the life of William Shakespeare’s family, specifically focusing on the death of his only son, Hamnet, and how that tragedy may have influenced his most famous play, Hamlet

In 1596, William Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet, died at the age of 11. Sometime between three and five years later, Shakespeare wrote a play which almost shared the boy’s name, and which has since become one of the most lauded dramatic works in existence. The possible link between these two events was the subject of an acclaimed 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell.

Now comes this quietly astonishing screen adaptation – with a script sensitively adapted by O’Farrell and the film’s director, Chloe Zhao – and with Jessie Buckley as Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway, and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare.

As in the book, Hathaway is here called Agnes, the name she was given in her father’s will. Her husband, meanwhile, is no famous playwright yet – his name is not mentioned for more than an hour – but the educated son of a Stratford glovemaker keeps pootling off to a London theatre for work. Agnes, meanwhile, remains with their three children – daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet – close to the ancient woodland with which she shares a deep and strange bond.

– In cinemas now

We see in this play that Zhao has swapped the Terrence Malick-like lyricism of Nomadland and The Rider for a less insistent style that allows the story’s emotions to naturally drift to the fore. These emotions are often tough – Agnes’s life, alongside her mother-in-law (a superb Emily Watson), can be hard, even before the plaque comes that will claim the life of one of her children. But there are also constant flashes of everyday wonder and joy, many of which we’re invited to imagine might have inspired elements in Shakespeare’s future work. (The twins often disguise themselves as one another for a game: very Twelfth Night.)

The slow start to this production is groundwork, and the sober visual approach puts a greater burden and expectation on Zhao’s leads, but they don’t so much rise to the challenge as spiral above it. Mescal has never been better, while as Agnes, Buckley seems to discover her character before your eyes: every moment she plays rings transparently true.

This is a category of film that is described as devastating, heartbreaking, even hard to watch – and at times it is certainly all of these things. But, without any doubt, it isn’t a downer, thanks in no small part to the sublime final reel.

Here, Agnes makes the journey to her husband’s playhouse in London – only for her grief to be both complicated and clarified by this play he has written called Hamlet, and is now staging with acutely moving variations on the same two-humans-swap-places trick that the couple’s children once adored.

One of these springs from the casting: the actor appearing as the young Danish prince is played by Noah Jupe – the real-life older brother of the child actor, Jacobi Jupe, who portrayed Hamnet in the earlier scenes.

The play’s speeches are raw and revelatory, despite being among the most worn in the English tongue: that sense of freshness is one of the film’s wildest achievements. What Hamnet leaves you with isn’t sadness, but joy – at the human capacity to reckon with death’s implacability through art, or love, or just the basic act of carrying-on in its defiance. It blows you back on to the street on a gust of pure exhilaration. 

Hamnet U cert, 125 min

Verdict: An exceptionally delivered adaptation ★★★★★

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Arts, Books, Culture, Literature, Society, Theatre

Wokeism has lost its grip on the arts

THE ARTS

Intro: This year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned.

From the literary world to the theatre, we have seen a pushback against identity politics

FOR many arts critics’ 2025 was the year that wokeism perished. And not before time.

Everyone, of course, is entitled to hold their own opinions, with some still representing a section of the liberal bien-pensant opinion in the arts that believes wokery to be a commendable necessity rather than an outdated and invidious ideology. Julian Clary, for instance, when interviewed recently, made his customary and screamingly inappropriate remarks that easily surpassed any definition of satire.

Nonetheless, this year has been one in which the tenets of woke, for so long held unquestionably in the performing arts and literary professions, started to be questioned. Unsurprisingly, it was swiftly discovered that the emperor had no clothes.

The publishing industry has been the most striking example of the upturned order. Around 2020, there was a clear edict that the profession had been taken over by white middle-class gatekeepers, and that this had to change in the interests of social justice.

If you stood against this – on the grounds that a bad book was a bad book, no matter what the skin colour, sexual orientation, or social background of its author – you were accused of being “elitist” and your career was promptly curtailed.

Scapegoats were routinely found, most egregiously the teacher and poet Kate Clanchy, who was the victim of little less than a witch hunt. Her apparent crime was that of “cultural appropriation”. Clanchy was driven to near-suicidal despair, and her publisher Pan Macmillan took ostentatious delight and glee in washing their hands of her.

Five years later, Clanchy has received a long overdue apology from Pan Macmillan for the reputational damage she suffered; the publisher stated that the hounding represented “a regrettable series of events in Pan Macmillan’s past”. A sympathetic and thorough BBC Radio 4 documentary, Anatomy of a Cancellation, examined the controversy afresh, interviewing those involved from all sides. Few would doubt that Clanchy emerged vindicated.

There have been other indications, too, that the wind is shifting. The Booker Prize for 2025 went to David Szalay’s Flesh, an unsparing account of the sexual and social coming-of-age of a taciturn young Hungarian man.

Szalay, the Stowe and Oxford-educated novelist of some standing, is a heterosexual white man – a category of people who are no longer supposed either to write or read novels – who has written a good book, rather than some piece of woke agitprop. There is every chance that it will endure far beyond flashier, less accomplished fiction.

So, too, should Thomas Peermohamed Lambert’s stunning debut Shibboleth, one of the funniest and wisest satirical narratives available on the hopeless state of contemporary academia.

Away from publishing, the National Theatre remains in thrall to modishness under its artistic director Indhu Rubasingham, but the visionary regime of the RSC’s Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey has demonstrated that classical theatre done well, with great actors, is what audiences really want to see. The arts world will be hopeful that the incoming artistic director of the Old Vic, Rupert Goold, will bring similar rigour to the South Bank next year.

Opera and classical music are following the lead, prizing clarity and intelligence above trendiness. Vanity Fair declared approvingly in recent times that “the opera is having a woke renaissance”. How things change. “Misguided wokeism” has been criticised as being the philistine impulse on part of the small-minded who believe that amateurism, with the “right” motivations, was somehow more impressive than non-ideological professionalism. Most people should agree.

The battle for good sense is not yet won, and we should be mindful of this. There are arts apparatchiks with their vested interests, wielding their pronouns and non-binary statuses like weapons of war, who will fight what they see as anti-progress for their entire lives. Yet others, who have been tired and fed up with tokenism and the oppressive rise of being told what to think – or else – may breathe a natural sigh of relief.

Most of us should be happy to end 2025 by seeing those who embrace wokeism with the same élan as they did previously [as being] behind us in time-honoured fashion.

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