This article explores thematic parallels between The Great Gatsby, Joyce’s Ulysses, and myths like the Land of Cockaigne. It examines motifs of abundance, identity, and longing, reflecting on how literature reinterprets recurring myths of paradise, excess, and the sea. The essay connects Gatsby’s parties to ancient banquets and discusses how these works mirror and refract…
Lenin’s London: 6 Oakley Square & Winifrede Gottschalk Paul
In November 1911, Lenin made one of his last visits to London. The future Soviet leader is believed to have been in town to give a lecture on ‘Stolypin and the Revolution’. The lecture took place at King’s Hall in London’s East End, a venue whose popularity with political exiles meant that it had much…
Who Turned The Great Gatsby into an Allegory of the American Dream? Podcast
“Gatsby, may be taken not only as an individual character but also as a symbolic or even allegorical character. It comes to seem more and more plausible that Gatsby, divided between power and dream, is to be thought of as standing for America itself. Ours is the only nation that prides itself upon a dream…
America, My Glorious Land. Poets, Assassins and The American Dream
In 1900, Captain James V. Martin, the man at the centre of the American Relief Administration scandal, published an anti-Expansionist pamphlet sponsored by Andrew Carnegie and William Jennings Bryan. This story explores the unlikely hand of friendship extended by American Populists to Russian Revolutionaries at the time of the McKinley Assassination. No one event, however…
American Relief Administration Scandal – Captain James V. Martin, Herbert Hoover & Russia
The Original Russian Job: The forgotten story of how a ‘secret compact’ between Churchill and America very nearly saved Russia from Lenin and the Soviet Union. This is the story of James V. Martin, an aviation pioneer who blew the whistle on American plans to smash the Bolsheviks at the height of post-war trade negotiations…
Imogen Heap Interview — God is in the details. Frou Frou album.
Imogen Heap and Guy Sigsworth (Frou Frou) are about to dish up a tasty nutritious blend of sultry yet spunky trip-hop in the form of the forthcoming single ‘Breathe In’ and debut album ‘Details’. Backed in the UK by LHB and Jo Wiley – this is about as ‘cred’ and as delightful as it gets…
The Glorious Fourth – A Writer’s Declaration
Users can also listen this story below At 10.00am yesterday morning I received an email prompt from Google asking me to check out a new A.I feature called Gemini Storybook. I was busy proofing a book that I am writing on F. Scott Fitzgerald, but curious, I took a look. And I’m glad I did….
Absolution — F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby’s Forgotten Prologue
Many people won’t know that The Great Gatsby once had a prologue. It was ditched by Fitzgerald when he realised that it didn’t fit with the ’general neatness’ of the book’s design. Instead, he offered to H. L. Mencken’s new American Mercury magazine for a $118. It’ s a deeply enigmatic tale, so what is…
A ‘Secret Mission’ to Russia. How F. Scott Fitzgerald very nearly became a spy.
In 1917, F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby, was nearly recruited for a covert mission to Russia, posing as a Red Cross secretary for Father Sigourney Fay. The mission, tied to US State Department interests during the Russian Revolution, aimed to gauge religious freedom and political shifts. Complicated by secret diplomacy and escalating…
Katharine Gotzian Tighe Fessenden — Proofing Paradise
Listen the podcast discussion of the article: You can listen a 10-minute version of the story here After quitting his job in New York and returning to his parents’ house in Saint Paul in July 1919, the 23 year-old Scott Fitzgerald was getting down to work on a new version of his debut novel, This…