The Weekend Listener is an eclectic list of noteworthy podcasts and radio recordings, old and new, curated for your listening pleasure. For more listening tips please search the website for previous instalments. LANGUAGE Idioms Idioms are a very peculiar feature of ‘natural language’. Defying the rules of syntax and semantics, they usually don't make much …
The Weekend Listener #7
The Weekend Listener is an eclectic weekly list of noteworthy podcasts and radio recordings, old and new, curated for your listening pleasure. Posts in this series are published on Fridays – please search the website for the previous instalments. LANGUAGE The Takeaway: What’s Lost When a Language Dies? Hundreds, if not thousands, of languages are …
Queer in more ways than one: “Carmilla”, a Gothic literary classic
Think of literary vampires, and everyone’s first association is bound to be Bram Stoker’s Dracula hailing from that dark, mystifying land of Transylvania. Enormously influential as it has been, Dracula had a notable antecedent in the form of an even more ground-breaking, yet lesser known, vampiric antagonist - Carmilla - created by the Irish novelist …
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Ghost stories of M R James
"If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained." Montague Rhodes James was a British writer and scholar. While his academic work in …
Horror cult classics: my top 3 Halloween tips
In case the ongoing pandemic and a host of other global disasters haven't been enough to spook you, here are a couple of suggestions as to how you might spend your evenings this Halloween season - or, if you're anything like me, most evenings during the entire year! PODCAST: Classic Ghost Stories At the moment …
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