At the end of 2022, two adaptations of Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons were released. Laclos’ novel, which was published in 1782, has been adapted for the screen several times, including the 1988 version (starring John Malkovich and Glenn Close) and the 1999 cult-classic Cruel Intentions (starring Sarah Michelle Gellar…

There is a scene in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby where Tom Buchanan — the All-American aristocrat — regurgitates an early version of what has come to be known as The Great Replacement theory. This theory is based on the belief that global elites are conspiring to replace white…

The Bacchae by Euripides depicts Dionysus and his followers initiating the ancient city of Thebes in his orgiastic ‘bacchanals’. The play begins with Dionysus expressing his anger at Thebes — the land of his mortal mother, Semele — for denying his divinity: DIONYSUS. I am the son of Zeus, Dionysus…

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland was inspired by a girl called Alice Liddell, the daughter of one of Carroll’s colleagues at Christ Church Oxford. Carroll, whose real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, was a career mathematician and part-time poet/ photographer, who would, in his capacity as family friend, tell stories…

Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies is a sociological study of proto-fascist literature. Theweleit, who read over two hundred texts written by members of the paramilitary Freikorps (which would eventually become an arm of the Nazi Party), found that many of their narratives had ‘peculiar’ passages in which women were mentioned. He…

For Nietzsche, the Apollonian and the Dionysian are ‘elemental forces’ that arise, predominantly, in art, and disposes the artist toward either the visionary (Apollo) or the orgiastic (Dionysus). It is not until his last (and unfinished) manuscript that Nietzsche applies these forces to ordinary life — but even here, he…

Nietzsche was not the first to refer to what is known as the Apollonian and the Dionysian (I believe that distinction belongs to the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann) — but Nietzsche was responsible for popularising the terms in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. According to Nietzsche…

Physiognomy — the judgement of character according to appearance — is experiencing a renaissance. On Twitter, the phrase ‘physiognomy remains undefeated’ is used (I’m assuming tongue-in-cheek) frequently. Although it is widely considered a pseudo-science, its revival, in certain circles, coincides with other ‘post-truth’ practices that privilege intuition over fact.