Colin Burrow is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His books include Shakespeare and Classical Antiquity and Imitating Authors: Plato to Futurity, as well as editions of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare and the metaphysical poets. His first contribution to the LRB, in 1999, was on British and Irish poetry of the Civil War; he has since written more than seventy pieces for the paper, on subjects from Catullus and Virgil to Hilary Mantel and Ursula Le Guin. He presented ‘On Satire’, an LRB Close Readings podcast series, with Clare Bucknell.
‘I’m one of those writers who likes to stay with what he knows,’ James Gillespie, the persistently apolitical hero of Ronan Bennett’s third novel, The Catastrophist (1998), says. Gillespie, now a novelist, was once a historian. In his PhD he had argued that ‘the great political and religious upheavals of the 16th century owed little to ideological or doctrinal...
Never trust a man called Smith. Or rather, don’t trust him if he has a fake beard and is travelling with another man called Smith who also has a fake beard. This is one of the profound moral lessons which emerge from one of the most extraordinary incidents in 17th-century English history.
On 17 February 1623, the future Charles I and the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham, set off...
Gardening today labours to be classless. TV programmes and books try to persuade us that we, whoever we are, can make over scrubby lawns, erect decking, build pergolas, plumb in water features, and construct a little Blenheim in a rectangle of twenty by thirty feet. Everyone knows this notion of classlessness is false, since nothing stimulates petty snobberies more immediately than a garden....
In November 1619 René Descartes retired into a ‘stove’ in order to reflect on the foundations of our knowledge of ourselves and the world. From his meditations he produced the bloodless certainty of the cogito: ‘I think therefore I am.’ The rest is intellectual history.
In 1571 Michel de Montaigne, suffering increasingly from melancholy, retired to the library...
“’Friendship’ between the sexes in this period had so many different and potentially conflicting aspects that no one who participated in such a relationship might know exactly what they were doing or quite what they finally meant, or how their friend might read their behaviour. It was the perfect social game for a society which was preparing itself to enjoy some of the pleasures afforded by the novel.”
Did Dickens ruin Christmas? He was certainly a pioneer in exploiting its commercial potential. A Christmas Carol sold 6,000 copies in five days when it was published on 19 December 1843, and Dickens...
Thackeray's comic masterpiece, 'Vanity Fair', is a Victorian novel looking back to Regency England as an object both of satire and nostalgia. Thackeray’s disdain for the Regency is present throughout...
The folk tales collected and rewritten by the Brothers Grimm may ‘seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone’, Colin Burrow wrote recently in the LRB, but ‘this is an illusion’. In the...
On one level, Mansfield Park is a fairytale transposed to the 19th century: Fanny Price is the archetypal poor relation who, through her virtuousness, wins a wealthy husband. But Jane Austen’s 1814 novel...
Roald Dahl's key skill, as Colin Burrow puts it, 'was his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible'. Following his review of a new biography, Burrow talks to Tom about Dahl’s limitations,...
Tom talks to Colin Burrow about a new book by Christopher Ricks, regarded by some as the greatest living literary critic. They also look back at his previous studies of, among others, Shakespeare, T.S....
Colin Burrow talks to Thomas Jones about the work of Ursula Le Guin.
Colin Burrow ranges from Homer to Ian McEwan in his search for the truth about the relationship between lies and fiction, in this LRB Winter Lecture.
The boundary between the broader and narrower senses has never been firm, and the history of literary imitation has always been bound up with the histories of philosophy, rhetoric and education. Plato,...
I must needs acknowledge, that the Greeke and Latine tongues, are great ornaments in a Gentleman, but they are purchased at over-high rate. Montaigne, Essays I grew up in postwar...
In his own time, Shakespeare was much better known to the reading public as a poet than as a playwright. Venus and Adonis went through ten editions before his death in 1616, and another six...
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