Seamus Perry

Oct 28, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Seamus Perry |mark ford

Wordsworth was not unusual among Romantic poets for his enthusiastic support of the French Revolution, but he stands apart from his contemporaries for actually being there to see it for himself (‘Thou wert there,’ Coleridge wrote). This episode looks at Wordsworth’s retrospective account of his 1791 visit to France, described in books 9 and 10 of The Prelude, and the ways in which it reveals a passionate commitment to republicanism while recoiling from political extremism.

Oct 9, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Juliette Bretan |Seamus Perry |Nicola Upson |E. J. Clery

Promising comfort is what a good stew should offer – but boeuf en daube, from Provence, with its cragged hunks of meat bespangled with olives and doused in shimmering, sepia-coloured broth, yields (if cooked correctly) exceptional pleasures. Or at least Mr Bankes in To the Lighthouse thinks so: “He had eaten attentively. It was rich; it was tender. It was perfectly cooked”.

Mar 28, 2024 | lrb.co.uk | Seamus Perry |mark ford

Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of Irish republicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in Ireland’s history and in Yeats's career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and interrogates his own attitude to nationalist violence.

Aug 24, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | mark ford |Seamus Perry

James Joyce wrote most of the short stories in his landmark collection, Dubliners, when he was still in his 20s, but a tortuous publishing history, during which printers refused or pulped them for their profanity, meant they weren’t published until 1914, when Joyce was 33. In their eighth episode, Mark and Seamus discuss the astonishing confidence of Joyce’s early work, which not only launched his literary career, but also initiated the grand project of his writing life.

Aug 2, 2023 | lrb.co.uk | Evelyn Waugh |Seamus Perry

‘Anovelist is condemned to produce a succession of novelties, new names for characters, new incidents for his plots, new scenery,’ reflects the beleaguered hero of The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, Evelyn Waugh’s portrait of the artist as a middle-aged car crash.