Stephen Regan

Dec 17, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Stephen Regan |Arts Highlights

The English Soul: Faith of a nation Reaktion Books, $39.99 hb, 384 pp United Kingdom A history of English Christianity The English Soul is a history of Christianity in England from the Venerable Bede to the present, a period of roughly 1,400 years. Its enthralling journey leads us from the medieval mystics, including Julian of Norwich, through the torments of the English Reformation and the exhilarating spread of revivalist and evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,...

Sep 25, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Stephen Regan |Arts Highlights

In the dying days of the ignominious Conservative government that he led from 2019 to 2022, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared his fall to that of Shakespeare’s Othello.

Jun 26, 2024 | australianbookreview.com.au | Stephen Regan |Arts Highlights

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’.

Dec 1, 2023 | literaryreview.co.uk | Andrew Motion |Stephen Regan

Elegiac poetry deals primarily with mortality, so The Penguin Book of Elegy might be seen as the inevitable – if much-delayed – sequel to George MacBeth’s The Penguin Book of Sick Verse (1963). That was a quirky production, though, ranging from physical illness to sick jokes. This is a canonical one, which claims to be ‘the only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language’. How to survey all the poetry that has ever been written about death?