Clare Bucknell

Nov 13, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Clare Bucknell

Novelists​ like to snoop inside their characters’ underwear drawers. In Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Laura, the heroine, finds her sister-in-law Caroline difficult to read, except in one telling aspect:Once only did she speak her spiritual mind to Laura.

Sep 26, 2024 | nybooks.com | Clare Bucknell

In the autumn of 1706 Daniel Defoe, the notorious satirist, pamphleteer, and convicted libeler, was posted to Scotland on an undercover mission. “I have Compass’t my First and Main step happily Enough, in That I am Perfectly Unsuspectd as Corresponding with anybody in England,” he reported to his paymaster in London, Robert Harley, the government’s northern secretary, who had dispatched him to gather intelligence and gauge support for a political union between the nations.

Feb 23, 2024 | apollo-magazine.com | Clare Bucknell

From the March 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here. In 1795, the German Romantic poet Friedrich von Matthisson visited the studio of the famous Swiss painter Angelica Kauffman in Rome. Kauffman, Matthisson reported, liked poetry to be read aloud to her while she worked. One morning, they heard a poem by Goethe, and Kauffman dropped her brush. ‘The entire being of the quiet, vestal-like, introverted woman became, as if through a violent electrical shock, elevated and shaken,’ he wrote.

Feb 4, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Clare Bucknell |Colin Burrow

Clare Bucknell and Colin Burrow Your browser does not support the audio element. In their second episode, Colin and Clare look at the dense, digressive and often dangerous satires of John Donne and other poets of the 1590s. It’s likely that Donne was the first Elizabethan author to attempt formal verse satires in the vein of the Roman satirists, and they mark not only the chronological start of his poetic career, but a foundation of his whole way of writing.

Sep 13, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Clare Bucknell

Tom Hargreaves​, the anti-hero of Megan Nolan’s second novel, is young, bland-faced and good at ingratiating himself in places he doesn’t belong.