Tag: English literature
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More Midcentury(ish) Roman Historical Fiction: John Williams’ Augustus and Evelyn Waugh’s Helena
Because I thought that with Daughter of Scorpions’ publication this spring, I was finally leaving the historical ancient Mediterranean behind (…we’ll see—I’ve been having intrusive thoughts recently about a fifth God’s Wife book…), I’ve been reading a bunch of other people’s Rome-adjacent novels. In February, we talked about two of them, Thornton Wilder’s The Ides…
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Egypt Under the Sun: Agatha Christie’s Akhnaton
AKHNATON: More lands, more subject peoples, bigger palaces, still greater temples to Amon, thousands of beautiful women where my father had hundreds? No, Horemheb, listen to my dream. A kingdom where men dwell in peace and brotherhood, foreign countries given back to rule themselves, fewer priests, fewer sacrifices. Instead of many women—one woman. A woman…
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Knowing It When You See It: Fanny Hill, Her Literary Sisters and Her Legacy
“…our virtues and our vices depend too much on our circum-stances…” (Fanny Hill, p. 77) I recently read John Cleland’s infamous novel Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/9), and while not really a piece of high literature, it got me thinking about a whole host of other banned/censored books and…
Sarah Holz 