It’s a different emotion whenever I read the Urdu language. I’m not a native speaker, nor have I actively pursued learning the language, but as someone who finds solace in reading shayari (Urdu poetry), I wanted to follow it even in Oxford.
In my year out before my postgraduate degree, I made the momentous decision to start writing fiction. I’d recently got back into reading novels, and thought becoming a novelist would be an ideal way to commit my name to posterity.
Pulses were sent racing in 1995 when Andrew Davies’ television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice saw Mr. Darcy, played by a fresh-faced Colin Firth, emerge sopping wet from a lake in a translucent white shirt that barely clung to his torso.
Their physical manifestations seem so much a part of the poetic experience that seeing them on a page, relying only on written descriptions for their original context, is almost a tease – a promise of the possibility of an even fuller experience.
Besides the classic value of literature in allowing us to understand perspectives and experiences beyond our own, reading in some ways reminds us of the bigger picture.
"Often important texts appear in humble form, and humble forms often tell us more about the humble people who made and used them." Daniel Wakelin talks to Cherwell about medieval manuscripts.
“Audiences deserted his lectures, Harvard students mocked his outfits, and his failures left him drunk and dejected."
Reviewing Michele Mendelssohn's 'Making Oscar Wilde'.
'This third instalment in Smith’s quartet is perhaps the best yet; a novel for our times that asks all the right questions of the current climate, but also of itself. '