David Trotter is emeritus professor of literature at Cambridge. Brute Meaning, a book of essays, some of which were first published in the LRB, came out in 2020.
On 14 March 2011, China’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, endorsed a Five-Year Plan incorporating a firm commitment to enhance the nation’s capacity for innovative research in science and technology. In the United States, this commitment was interpreted as a green light for no-holds-barred military and industrial espionage. Cyber-warfare became one of the...
Hitchcock’s comedy thriller The 39 Steps, first released in June 1935, has become a ‘classic’. But it’s also a film of its moment, or more precisely of the difference between two moments: the summer of 1915, when the novel by John Buchan on which it’s based began to appear in serial form, in the middle of one world war; and the summer of 1935, when the odds on...
According to elevator legend, it all began with a stunt. In the summer of 1854, at the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York, an engineer called Elisha Graves Otis gave regular demonstrations of his new safety device. Otis had himself hoisted into the air on a platform secured on either side by guide-rails and – at a suitably dramatic height – cut the cable. Instead of plummeting to the ground fifty feet below, the platform stopped dead after a couple of inches. ‘All safe, gentlemen, all safe,’ Otis would bellow at the expectant crowd.
In a letter written in July 1926, a couple of months before he embarked on the first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence gave voice – as he often did – to the hatred he felt for ‘our most modern world’. Tin cans and ‘imitation tea’ feature prominently on his list of things not to like about being ‘most modern’. Tin cans often...
Alfred Hitchcock’s Rich and Strange (1931) includes a quietly compelling scene set on a Tube train packed with office-weary commuters. The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next to an attractive blonde in a beret and white raincoat, whom he manages to ignore completely as he struggles to stay upright while unfurling his newspaper. She doesn’t quite return the lack of...
David Trotter talks to Joanne O’Leary about the novels and stories of Elizabeth Bowen, from her weird families and idiosyncrasies of style, to her mastery of atmospherics and prescient use of technology...
What is now called trauma theory informs contemporary biography as much as it does the academic practice of literary history. Belief in trauma as a kind of agency, as a cultural force – in...
Once, recycling was a way of life, conducted without civic ordinances, highway beautification statutes, adopt-a-motorway programmes or special bins for paper, glass and metal. Until the mid-19th...
The Wellesley Index originated in its founding editor Walter Houghton’s The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 (1957), a manual which was influential among students of the Sixties....
‘Fit audience, though few,’ said Milton; and thereupon declared the terms in which the issue of reader-response would be considered by poets from his day to ours. The widely-read...
So Pope wrote in 1737, since which time Cowley has passed almost entirely into the hands of academic literary historians, whose chief service to him has been the rediscovery of his unfinished...
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