Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookAd Bellum PurificandumKenneth Burke’s epigraph to his Grammar of Motives (1945) is ‘Ad bellum purificandum’— ‘for the purification of war.’ Mark Edmundson quotes…1d ago1d ago
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookMoney, it’s a Gas/Grab That Cash With Both Hands and Make a StashA while back, fifteen years or so, I started writing a story for kids. Children’s literature, or YA, has never been my thing: not because I…3d ago33d ago3
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookThe Earthquake God SpeaksAnd it is also creative, this mad Restlessness of men. I shudder down their cities; They build them up again.5d ago5d ago
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookDumas’ Electric MusketeerAlexandre Dumas’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844) first introduces us to d’Artagnan, a young man up from the provinces to Paris, hoping to…6d ago16d ago1
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookChristina Scull and Wayne G Hammond (eds) ‘The Collected Poems of J R R Tolkien’ (HarperCollins…A big book, in three volumes: fully 1500 pages of Tolkienian verse. It’s a very handsome piece of book production: good quality paper, well…Sep 131Sep 131
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookViktor Rydberg, ‘The Freebooter of the Baltic’ (1857)Viktor Rydberg was, perhaps, the most important Swedish novelist of the nineteenth-century, though he’s little known in the UK, what with…Sep 12Sep 12
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookMusée des Prole ArtsAbout suffering they were often wrong, the Old Masters: distracted by wealth and rank, as if pain only matters when it afflicts the high…Sep 10Sep 10
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookCities as CurrencyEarly in El Cid (directed Anthony Mann, 1961) — which we watched the other day — the King of Aragon comes to the court of Castile ruled by…Sep 9Sep 9
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookEadgar of Poe, ‘Þe Hræfn’Midniht wæs ond ful dreoriġ, hwīl biþoht-mi, wac ond weriġ, Uppan monig an ascung wyrdig boc of lār forgoten al — Ich ġedrusod, eallmæst…Sep 51Sep 51
Adam RobertsinAdam’s NotebookOn the name ‘Hamlet’There are, it seems, three theories as to the meaning of the name ‘Hamlet’.Sep 23Sep 23