Bradley Strotten

1 week ago | quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Bradley Strotten

A review of The Sleepers by Matthew Gasda, 288 pages, Arcade Publishing (May 2025)In his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot writes, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” It’s not feelings of personal injury and past trauma that we mine for poetic inspiration, it’s the archives of the canon.

Mar 16, 2025 | unherd.com | Bradley Strotten

DispatchDogsFight dogsRural EnglandSocietyUKXl BullyXL Bully ban ‚ÄúVast!‚ÄĚ Jason shouted, which means fix in place, ‚ÄúVast!‚ÄĚ. And a muscled black-and-tan Malinois with titanium-coated k9s locked on to my left arm. It was an otherwise quiet afternoon in Kentish suburbia. In a woods tucked away from the Barratt Homes and play park, I stood in a bite suit, pressed against a tree, as my old friend Jason shouted instructions at Trigger ‚ÄĒ his ‚Äúak47 on a leash‚ÄĚ.

Feb 25, 2025 | quillette.com | Brad Strotten |John Lloyd |Ronald Dworkin |Gerfried Ambrosch |Bradley Strotten

A review of We Do Not Part by Han Kang, 272 pages, Hogarth (February 2025)“Here they come,” wrote Kingsley Amis of Colin Wilson’s debut book, the bold existentialist anthology, The Outsiders, “tramp, tramp, tramp—all those characters you thought were discredited, or had never read, or (if you are like me) had never heard of: Barbusse, Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, Hemingway, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Tolstoy [and] Dostoevsky.”This was textbook Amis.

Feb 12, 2025 | spiked-online.com | Bradley Strotten |Tom Slater

Story of Us is a futile attempt to unite the nation under the banner of BBC-approved orthodoxies. Share Topics Culture UK Want to read spiked ad-free? Become a spiked supporter. When a BBC documentary about Britain’s postwar history is given a title as immodest as Story of Us, it invites two obvious questions. Who is it that’s telling our story? And who the hell are ‘we’, anyway?

Oct 25, 2024 | quillette.com | Brad Strotten |Theodore Hill |Allan Stratton |Helen Dale |Bradley Strotten

A review of I Will Live by Lale Gül; 320 pages; Virago (August 2024)Lale Gül’s autobiographical debut novel Ik ga leven (“I Will Live”) was first published in Dutch in 2021 when the author was just 23. It became an immediate bestseller and was published in English translation last month. The story follows the dramatic unveiling of Gül’s fictional counterpart, Büsra, a twenty-year-old Muslim rebel living in the Netherlands and chafing against religious and cultural authority.