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‘Opening a door on a misty landscape’
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How the first chapter of Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends constructs the conceit of the text Note: This analytical close reading was originally written in 2021 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature: Literature Past and Present at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. It is…
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‘London is illimitable’
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How Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway represents the city by superseding its bounds Note: This analytical close reading was originally written in 2021 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature: Literature Past and Present at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. It is reproduced here in full…
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‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.’
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How form impacts persona and message in the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen Note: This analytical close reading was originally written in 2020 in partial fulfillment of the requirements for my Undergraduate Diploma in English Literature: Literature Past and Present at the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education. It is reproduced…
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REVIEW: Soldiers: Army Lives and Loyalties from Redcoats to Dusty Warriors by Richard Holmes
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Note: This book review was originally written for an academic reading course on “total war”. That conceptual focus is reflected in the review. Total war as a concept requires, among its many facets, discussion of total mobilisation, which in turn requires insight into the men and women being mobilised for total war aims. Richard…
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REVIEW: The Shadows of Total War: Europe, East Asia, and the United States, 1919–1939 ed. Roger Chickering and Stig Forster
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The Shadows of Total War is the fourth volume in a series of five collating the proceedings of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C’s conferences on total war. This collection of 18 essays examines the concept through the interwar period, covering a spread of topics from military history as well as interdisciplinary perspectives.…
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REVIEW: The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It by David Bell
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When does a war become total? David Bell answers that typological question by illustrating the first time, to his eyes, a war ever bore the social, philosophical, and practical hallmarks of a conflict that saw mass mobilisation, radicalised war aims, and blurred the civilian-soldier line – hallmarks that, arguably, best encapsulate total war as…
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REVIEW: The Glass Spare by Lauren DeStefano
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The Glass Spare bears all the hallmarks of its era (just past the midpoint of the 2010s YA fantasy): a vague fantastical world, a teen girl protagonist with a magical ability that jump starts the narrative, and a male love interest that becomes part of a generally flat love story. I don’t think it’s necessarily…
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REVIEW: Can War Be Eliminated? by Christopher Coker
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Can War Be Eliminated? is a slim volume – an essay bound up in book form, really – and that very much dictates the tack it takes to answer its provocative titular question. It is a solid overview of what war is from an evolutionary, cultural, sociological, technological, and political perspective. However, its scope is…
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REVIEW: Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
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I drank so much coffee while reading this book and writing this review – which, if anything, speaks to its supreme ability to make me yearn not just to return to the joys of cafes, but specifically to one run by an orc and her motely crew of companions. It is genuinely one of…
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REVIEW: A Light in the Sky by Shina Reynolds
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It has been years since I have read YA fantasy. I seem to remember clocking out around the time Holly Black’s Wicked King was released, and staying away since. Who can succinctly say why we enter reading slumps? Perhaps the most universal explanation is a host of internal and external factors clogging one’s mind. And when…