Page 3 - Christopher Ricks News Today

Idiot Wind, on Bob Dylans Blood on the Tracks, is replete with religious imagery. But where does the titular phrase come from?

There are so many books that are not “great,” but are still worth saving from oblivion, at least for the moment. Brian Moore’s work falls into this category.

Literary critic William Empson, in a famous study, described Satan as the de facto hero of the epic in a cosmic revolt against divine repression.

Richard Wollheim’s Germs is a brilliant and curious example of a genre dedicated to unraveling the riddles of a time we have a hard time remembering.

What ministers won’t admit about A-levels on The Spectator Australia | The tale of A-levels shows how ministers can sometimes find themselves in a position…

Written by Andrew McCallum Waiting for Bob Dylan’s Auckland show in 2018 to start, I had a chat with an older man in the seat two rows down from mine. “Is this your first show?” I asked. “Yes” he said. “Dylan’s a legend. I gotta see him.”  A moment later an announcement came over the PA: there are to be no cameras, no photos, no video recordings during the concert. Turn your phones OFF! The announcement is repeated several times. Five-part web series Bob Dylans New Zealand airi...

Not long ago, in my capacity as a literary editor, I was exchanging emails with the eminent Dylanologist Clinton Heylin. Heylin wanted to review a new biography of Bob Dylan and I was sceptical. Could there be anything more to say about Dylan? Haven’t those ashes, by now, been thoroughly raked? “There have been so many,” I complained. “You obviously know something I don’t,” Heylin replied with a steely good grace – because, needless to say, I knew, and he knew I knew, and I knew h...

“She was a narcissist who described herself beautifully.” The description of the mid 20th-century novelist Jean Rhys doesn’t apply to the author who wrote it, even if, in style and sentiment, it epitomises the publication in which it appeared – sly, aphoristic and unapologetically imperious. Mary-Kay Wilmers published her first piece for the London Review of Books in 1981, two years after joining the “paper” as an editor and 11 years before she became the editor-in-chief. (She is...

Abstract This essay gives a brief overview of the events of 26-27 August 1883, when the volcanic island of Krakatoa in Indonesia exploded; it generated tsunamis which killed over 36,000 people, was heard 3,000 miles away, and produced measurable changes in sea level and air pressure across the world. The essay then discusses the findings of the Royal Society’s Report on Krakatoa, and the reports in the periodical press of lurid sunsets resulting from Krakatoa’s dust moving through the atmos...