Helen Thaventhiran

Emily Hale​ was Eliot’s ‘Raspberrymouth’. That’s what he called her in the love letters they began exchanging in 1927, a correspondence that intensified in the early 1930s, and continued through the awkward years of their disentanglement after the death of his first wife, Vivien, in 1947. Eliot’s love for Emily, his ‘Tall Girl’, retained all the shy...

‘In daily life,​ we regularly rely on hinges, clamps, buttons, zippers, Velcro, laces, knots, stitches, tape, stickers and glue,’ Rita Felski writes. ‘What are their aesthetic equivalents?’ In Hooked, she examines the way we connect to novels, films, paintings and music, and argues that our enthusiasms should be an integral part of conversations about art. Only this...