Every essay, quote collection and review on the site, newest first.
Albums Named After Books
Records that borrow a title, a character or a whole plot from literature. What each album takes from the book, and how closely it…
How to Look at a Painting: A Slow Method
Most museum visitors spend seconds per painting. A simple order for looking longer: distance, light, edges, then subject, and what each step tends to…
The Great Wave Off Kanagawa: What Hokusai’s Print Is Really Showing
Look past the wave and there are three boats and a small Mount Fuji. How the print was made, why there are many copies,…
Impressionism vs Post-Impressionism: How to Tell Them Apart
Monet painted light; Cézanne, Van Gogh and Seurat each went somewhere else with it. The differences in brushwork, colour and intent, with the paintings…
Pride and Prejudice: The Book vs the Film Adaptations
The 1995 series, the 2005 film and the novel tell the same story with different heroines. Which scenes each adaptation adds, cuts or changes,…
How to Build a Personal Book Collection Worth Keeping
A collection is a set of choices, not a pile of books. How to pick a focus, what makes an edition worth owning, and…
Books About Music and Musicians
Novels and nonfiction that make you hear the music on the page. A shelf for anyone who reads liner notes.
Novels About Painters and Paintings
From Zola's The Masterpiece to Woolf's Lily Briscoe, novels that put a painter at the centre and take the work seriously. What each one…
Kafka’s Most Unsettling Lines, and Where They Come From
The Metamorphosis opens with a man waking up as an insect and treats it as a scheduling problem. Kafka's flattest, strangest sentences, and what…
Alice in Wonderland’s Oddest Lines, Explained
Carroll's nonsense has rules. The strangest lines in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the chapter each comes from, and the logic…
The Strangest Sentences in Classic Literature
Serious novels contain some very strange sentences. A collection of the oddest, from Sterne to Dickens to Melville, with the context that explains, or…
Quotes About Reading and Books, From the Books Themselves
Many famous "quotes about reading" have no source anyone can find. These ones do: what novelists actually wrote about reading, with the book and…
Book Quotes About the Sea
From Moby-Dick to The Awakening, the sea in literature is rarely just water. The lines that make the point, cited to the chapter.
Book Quotes About Solitude
Thoreau, Dickinson, Melville and the Brontës on being alone, which is not always the same thing as being lonely. Each line with its book…