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The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame Graham
Read more: The Complete Scottish Sketches of R. B. Cunninghame GrahamCunninghame Graham's great-grandnephew reveals his favourite sketch of the celebrated Scottish writer
OLR 40th Anniversary – Maurice Blanchot
Marcel Proust once said, “Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.” Friendship, and the role it plays in life, is an interesting and varied topic explored…
Viking Law and Order
My new book, Viking Law and Order, paints a rather different picture of Viking Age society from the one we are used to. We often hear discussions of violent raids and systematic pillaging by warriors arriving in long ships. It…
John M. MacKenzie on ‘Bogeys’ Past and Present
It would seem that elements of the Anglosphere have always required a bogey or a multiplicity of bogeys. Perhaps other spheres do too. It is certainly the case that the notion of coping with the feared evil ‘Other’ has also…
Sentimentalism and the Musical at Eurovision 2017
The 2017 Eurovision Song Contest was won this year by Portugal’s entry, with a singer called Salvador Sobral, who sang a simple, heartfelt song of love and loss. Over and against the elaborate stage mechanics and outlandish attempts at eclecticism…
American television and off-screen registers: a corpus-based comparison
In this post, Tony Berber Sardinha and Marcia Veirano Pinto detail their corpus based research on American television and off-screen registers for an article appearing in Corpora. Read the full article including details of the methodology and results here. What…
OLR 40th Anniversary – Ann Smock
Welcome to the not-so-sunny days of August where, in the perpetual spirit of celebrating OLR’s 40th anniversary, we are sharing the work of Ann Smock, currently Professor Emerita of French at the University of California. Perhaps best known for her…
Shining the spotlight on British cinema’s female stars
Britain has long had a contradictory relationship to movie stardom, as two articles from the fan magazine Picturegoer, both by the same writer, both from 1943, eloquently demonstrate. In October, Lionel Collier had asked hopefully ‘are we making our own…
Celebrating 70 Years of the Edinburgh International Festival
An extract from The Edinburgh Festivals: Culture and Society in Post-war Britain by Angela Bartie On Sunday 24 August 1947, the first Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama opened with a service of praise in St Giles’ Cathedral, the…
Art, Literature and the Multilingual Spaces of post-Brexit Democracy
The notion of “sovereignty” has been made central to the debate heading toward Brexit, but what does it mean? Does ‘getting one’s country back’ mean recovering it from immigration, neoliberal capitalism, or both? Does it mean closing one’s borders and…