Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His books include Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity and Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity, as well as editions of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. His first contribution to the LRB, in 1999, was on British and Irish poetry of the Civil War; he has since written more than seventy pieces for the paper, on subjects from Catullus and Virgil to Hilary Mantel and Ursula Le Guin. He presented ‘On Satire’, an LRB Close Readings podcast series, with Clare Bucknell.
What do we mean when we call someone a ‘character’? It’s often a way of indicating that a person habitually says or does things that most people wouldn’t say or do. It might be that the character makes risqué jokes, or that he likes to abseil down tall buildings while wearing a pink Spider-Man costume, or that he’s actually just a pain in the arse. My...
You can learn a lot about a person from the way they react to the death of a pet. The norm: uncontrollable sobbing, then mythologising its wonders and uniqueness. Perhaps after a few weeks you begin to hear its ghostly paws behind you. Then, after a decent interval, you get another one, not a replacement of the irreplaceable, of course, but to fill the void.
Muriel Spark loved her cat...
Satire is a great angry sprawling mass. It’s one of those literary phenomena which is impossible to define but which most people recognise when they see it – unless they’re as dim as the Irish bishop who is supposed to have said of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels that ‘for his part he hardly believed a word of it’ (‘hardly’ is a...
The hyper-courtly Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly...
In 1904 Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume. It didn’t include everything:...
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens...
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout...
The folk tales collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm may ‘seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone’, Colin Burrow wrote recently in the LRB, but ‘this is an illusion’. In the...
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel...
Roald Dahl's key skill, as Colin Burrow puts it, 'was his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible'. Following his review of a new biography, Burrow talks to Tom about Dahl’s limitations,...
Tom talks to Colin Burrow about a new book by Christopher Ricks, regarded by some as the greatest living literary critic. They also look back at his previous studies of, among others, Shakespeare, T.S....
Colin Burrow talks to Thomas Jones about the work of Ursula Le Guin.
Colin Burrow ranges from Homer to Ian McEwan in his search for the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction, in this LRB Winter Lecture.
The boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato,...
I must needs acknowledge, that the Greeke and Latine tongues, are great ornaments in a Gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high rate. Montaigne, Essays I grew up in postwar...
In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six...
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