Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray

Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country C...

London Review of BooksLondon Review of Books

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Nature in Crisis: ‘Blue Machine’ by Helen Czerski

In Blue Machine (2024), Helen Czerski refigures the ocean as an enormous planetary engine, converting light and heat into motion. Her book invites us to see the ocean not as an ‘absence’ but an intricate series of operations that makes life as we know it possible. In this episode ...  Show more

 . 15min 11sec
Who's afraid of realism? 'Notes from Underground' by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky’s 1864 novella doesn’t contain the descriptive detail, impersonal narration or many other features of 19th-century realism established by Flaubert. The book’s two-part structure, which starts with a 40-year-old’s furious rant against rationalism and moves on to present ...  Show more

 . 20min 17sec

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