Emily Brontë Heathcliff is an enigma who must and can only remain an enigma. The unknowability of his origins, the instability of his identity, are the whole point. To argue that he is ‘from’ anywhere, or is of this or that race, is fruitless. If he is ‘from’ anywhere, it is hell, and the intention is that he be perceived as a supernatural, demonic being, and it is this that elevates the novel from Victorian melodrama to the Gothic. Wuthering Heights  is formed and informed b

In my callow youth, after first leaving home, I owned several garlic presses in succession. I thought they, and garlic itself, sophisticated. Growing up in 1980s rural Lincolnshire cooking suspicious foreign food was something that might land you in a burning Wicker Man, screaming for mercy from jeering, turnip-faced yokels. Now, at the risk of having a contract taken out on me by Alessi or Oxo Good Grips, I would urge anyone in possession of one of these nefarious devices to

An in depth-look at Gary Indian's trilogy of crime novels, Resentment, Three Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference.

"Energy is Eternal Delight" William Blake A still from Nikita Mikhalkov's 1980 film adaptation of Oblomov I Oblomov, the eponymous anti-hero of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 satirical novel, is the living embodiment of inertia. He's widely considered to be the epitome of the ‘superfluous man’ of Russian literature of the 1840s and 1850s, but has none of the Byronism, glamour, or elegance of Turgenev’s Bazarov or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin . A man in his thirties liv

A look back at Narciso Ibanez Serrador's haunting 1976 cult horror movie Who Can Kill a Child?   Spanish Director Narciso Ibanez Serrador directed only two films, The House that Screamed , 1968, and Who Can Kill a Child  (AKA Island of the Damned ), 1976. The former is an influential high-point of the horror genre, the latter one of its masterpieces. Both were smash hits in Spain, but were heavily cut and badly distributed in the US and the rest of Europe. The Uruguayan-born

Pepe le Pew, a member of the marginalised skunk community, about to experience olfactory prejudice When Ally Louks created a Twitter storm after announcing that she’d passed her PhD with her thesis Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose, it gave outsiders a rare glimpse into postgraduate English studies in the UK. Based on the title alone, any criticism was unwarranted: it sounded innocuous enough, and potentially interesting, though not ori

A long-form article about Roman Polanksi's 1968 film Rosemary's Baby, and how it relates to collectivsm, conformity and his experience as a Jew during the Second World War.