In 1791, a woman on a slave ship was diagnosed with smallpox. In order to isolate the disease, she was tied to a chair and thrown overboard. Of the 142 slaves on the ship, 121 were delivered on arrival. In economic terms, then, the solution to the potential outbreak was a success, with one minor exception: the captain, the […]
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Arnold Bennett, no stranger to the quotidian himself, once accused James Joyce of selecting the “dailiest day” as the subject of his novel Ulysses. Les Misérables, then, could be said to concern itself with the most epical epic: it is the story of a decades long feud between petty thief Jean Valjean (Ramin Karimloo) and police inspector Javert (Will […]
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In his lifetime, James Joyce considered the possibility of having Ulysses adapted into a movie—and even met once with Sergei Eisenstein about it. After his death, two attempts were made in English: Joseph Strick’s 1967 Ulysses and Sean Walsh’s 2003 Bloom, both of which—like Marleen Gorris’ 1997 Mrs. Dalloway—sacrifice the spirit of the great novel […]
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