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Contrary to Craig Raine's assertion (Afterthoughts, December 22/29), the recollection of Daisy Fay's wedding in The Great Gatsby is not an 'abrupt, clumsy moment'. the narrator, Nick, has arranged to [...]

A HISTORY OF ARCADIA IN ART AND LITERATURE Volume 1: Earlier Renaissance Volume 2: Later Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassicism PAUL HOLBERTON 976pp. Ad Ilissvm. [pounds sterling]80, or [pounds sterling]50 each. [...]

GENIUS LOCI An essay on the meanings of place JOHN DIXON HUNT 216pp. Reaktion. 20 [pounds sterling]. In 1975 John Dixon Hunt co-edited an exemplary collection of extracts from seventeenth- [...]

Keats and Mrs Jones had a thing going on. They had a feeling that it was wrong, so they kept very quiet about it. Keats never mentioned her name in [...]

This article, originally presented as a keynote talk at the Sixteenth International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference on 28 June 2023 in Växjö, Sweden, examines the influence of Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, composed between 1848 and 1874) on F. Scott Fitzgerald's depiction of extractive capitalism in his 1920 short story "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and in The Great Gatsby. Although no direct evidence exists that Fitzgerald either read The Ring as the epic poem Wagner first wrote or attended a performance, "Wagnerism" was a central influence on modernist thinking, in particular the second opera of the cycle, Die Walküre (The Valkyrie). Fitzgerald absorbed a particular version of The Ring legend in which the theft of a magical gold ring from the maidens of the Rhine and their curse that whoever owns it may accumulate all the wealth of the world but will be doomed to a violent death serves as an allegory of extractive capitalism. This interpretation of Wagner was pervasive in the works of several authors who shaped Fitzgerald, including George Bernard Shaw and Joseph Conrad. "Diamond" and Gatsby share a vision of anthropogenic climate change that begins with the mass burning of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution and culminates for Fitzgerald in the flagrant consumer squandering of natural resources during the Jazz Age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tom Sperlinger writes, in his excellent account of higher education trends in the US (April 23): 'Innovators, such as Arizona State, which has 30,000 students enrolled online, remain an exception'. [...]

Fifty seven writers discuss their choices for the Book of the Year for 2010. These include John Updike's 'My Father's Tears' and 'Rabbit Angstrom'