Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
With the recent surge of interest in Conrad’s text following the programme airing in July, one needs to question the contribution that BCC’s adaption offers to the oeuvre of Conrad’s criticism. Tony Marchant’s adaption is acutely aware of global relevance of this text, noting that the “contemporaneity just hit[s]” you “in the face”. Yet, his production precisely fails in this presentation of terrorism.
John Lyon reflects on what it was like to introduce The Secret Agent.
An excerpt from The Secret Agent to get you excited about our upcoming Book Club discussion.
May’s book is The Secret Agent!
Baroness Orczy’s Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) is one of those popular novels that we tend to assume we already know without having read it. This tale of the French Revolution has been adapted many, many times, for the stage, small and large screens, and radio, and it has been frequently parodied over the decades, most famously, perhaps, by the Carry On team with Don’t Lose Your Head (aka Carry on Pimpernel).
By Michael Newton
“The trouble with you,” an old friend recently declared to me, “is that you have always been a conformist.” He meant that I had never undertaken that necessary radical break with my parents and their ideals and interests. Without such a generational rupture, it seemed to him, nobody could claim to be a fully independent, realised person. While he had been dropping acid and dropping (temporarily) out of college, I’d been reclining under a tree with John Keats. And surely there was nothing rebellious in that.
When talking about spy fiction, people sometimes confuse verisimilitude and reality. Spy novelists who use the words “friends” and “cousins” to describe our American collaborators are engaging in verbal verisimilitude. When John Le Carré tells us in his latest novel A Delicate Truth that the business of secret intelligence is now being privatized, he’s conveying an important reality.
The answers to this week’s Oxford World’s Classics Quiz
This month’s book club pick is Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
What do you think Conrad was saying about the interaction between government and terrorists?
Tomorrow is the discussion of The Secret Agent.
Along with Reich, Riley and Young, Glass was a principal figure in the establishment of minimalism in the 1960s. He has since become one of the most successful composers of his generation. He studied the violin at six, then at eight the flute with Britton Johnson at the Peabody Conservatory.