Books

When it comes to the Trojan War — this one was won with a horse — Fry weaves in Homer’s version with elements of Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and ...

When the critic, M.L. Rosenthal, used the phrase, “confessional poetry”, while reviewing Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in 1959, he was quick to realize the problem with his ...

In 1958, Bank of America put a credit card with a $500 limit in 60,000 mail-boxes in Fresno, California, as an experiment. Some used the card and paid; a lot of cards were stolen and misused. Bank of ...

The narrative device of a trial provides an astute means of highlighting the perspectives of these characters who often find themselves caught in divine machinations. For instance, both Ahalya —...

The last one-third of Lepore’s book is the most devastating as she outlines with a considerable volume of facts and an array of opinions how this company attempted to use methods of psychologica...

What elements are essential for writing a good love story? I think the most important factor for writing a love story is the connectivity factor. Thinking as a reader, if your characters are able to ...

When Samuel O’Reilly opened his tattoo shop in 1875 in Bowery, New York City, there were only a few like him. Like many, he stumbled upon the world of tattooing after a stint in the criminal jus...

Readers who prefer to engage with feeling and anecdote rather than hard data would be struck by Tumbe’s wide-ranging literary references, which include Kautilya, Giovanni Boccaccio, Munshi Premc...

The prose is rich, too rich sometimes. Expressions like “his temper, which stuck to his side like a faithful old cur”, or “speech is a coin hoarded for these past three months”...

This is also complicated by the fact that the memory of the Second World War in Southeast Asia is not an abstract matter —it doesn’t concern pre-historical matters whose actors have now sa...