Offered to the Gods 
Frank Kermode
- Culture and Sacrifice: Ritual Death in Literature and Opera by Derek Hughes Buy this book
This extraordinary book examines the practice and the cultural contexts of human sacrifice, more or less from its speculative prehistoric beginnings to Margaret Atwood’s recent novel The Blind Assassin. To succeed in such an enterprise an author must be fantastically well read, expert in the disposition of large tracts of material in various languages, some of it by great artists and some by no less useful journeymen. He must also take care to guard against the possibility of his book being mistaken for another sort of study which it superficially resembles but which is less cautious in dealing with speculative prehistoric beginnings.
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Frank Kermode’s most recent book is The Age of Shakespeare. He lives in Cambridge.
Other articles by this contributor:
‘Disgusting’ · Frank Kermode remembers William Empson
At Tate Britain · William Blake
Flinch Wince Jerk Shirk · Christine Brooke-Rose
Complicated Detours · Darwin’s Worms by Adam Phillips
Here she is · Zadie Smith
Point of View · Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Savage Life · The Adventures of William Empson
‘It’s the way people like us don’t talk’ · Andrew Motion’s Boyhood
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