Recent Publications

Annotations to James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sam Slote, Marc Mamigonian, John Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024)

James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. This volume, with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike. he annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary allusions, such as Shakespeare, Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, slang from various eras and areas, foreign language words and phrases, Hiberno-English expressions, Catholic ritual and theology, Irish histories, Theosophy, Freemasonry, cricket, astronomy, fashion, boxing, heraldry, the symbolism of tattoos, horse racing, advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, superstitions, music-hall songs, references to Dublin topography precise enough for a city directory, and much more besides. 

Ulysses Forty Years: A Critical Retrospective of Hans Walter Gabler’s Critical and Synoptic Edition of Ulysses, edited by Georgina Nugent and Sam Slote  (Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2024)

2024 is the 40th anniversary of Hans Walter Gabler’s critical and synoptic edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1984 by Garland. Ulysses Forty Years brings together a collection of essays from the world’s foremost Joyce scholars that serves as a critical retrospective on the Gabler Ulysses. This collection of essays encompasses the field of Joyce studies, editorial theory and practice, and textual criticism; examining the impact and legacy of the Gabler Ulysses in the context of Joyce Studies and beyond in terms of its wider impact in the context of textual criticism, digital editing, translation studies and editorial theory.

Derek Mahon: A Retrospective, edited by Nicholas Grene and Tom Walker (Liverpool University Press, 2024)

Derek Mahon (1941–2020) is widely recognized as one of the most important Irish poets of his generation. This collection of new critical essays offers an important retrospective assessment of the nature of his poetic achievement. Bringing together many leading scholars of modern and contemporary Irish poetry, including a notable number of accomplished poet-critics, its contributors range widely across Mahon’s body of work. Their essays offer fresh considerations of the biographical, geographical and literary contexts that shaped his poetic voice. 

As a whole, the collection opens up many new ways of reading and understanding Mahon’s important body of work.

Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century, Nicholas Grene (Oxford University press, 2024)

'Irish Theatre in the Twenty-First Century' is the first in-depth study of the subject. It analyses the ways in which theatre in Ireland has developed since the 1990s when emerging playwrights Martin McDonagh, Conor McPherson, and Enda Walsh turned against the tradition of lyrical eloquence with a harsh and broken dramatic language.

Rapture's Road, Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape, 2024).

As the mind wanders and becomes spectral, these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. The road Hewitt takes us on is a sleepwalk into the nightwoods, a dream-state where nature is by turns regenerated and broken, and where the split self of the speaker is interrupted by a series of ghosts, memories and encounters.

Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in Tongues of Fire, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.

A threnody for what is lost, a dance of apocalypse and rebirth, Rapture’s Road draws us through what is hidden, secret, often forbidden, to a state of ecstasy. It leads into the humid night, through lethal love and grief, and glimpses, at the end of the journey, a place of tenderness and reawakening.

Emotional Practice in Old English Literature, Alice Jorgensen (Boydell and Brewer, 2024).

This book argues that a range of Old English texts were vehicles for emotional practice – that is, for doing things with emotion. Using case studies from heroic poetry (Beowulf, The Battle of Brunanburh and The Battle of Maldon), religious poetry (Christ I and Christ III) and homilies (selections from the Vercelli Book, the Blickling Homilies and the works of Wulfstan), it shows how they could be used to act out emotional styles, manage the emotions arising from specific events, and negotiate relationships both within social groups and with God. In addition, the Old English Boethius teaches readers to control unruly emotions by transferring attachment from the things of this world to the divine. Overall, the volume offers new angles on the social functions of genres and questions of reception and performance; and it gives insight into how early medieval people used emotions to relate to their world, temporal and eternal.

Imagining the Irish Child: Discourses of Childhood in Irish Anglican Writing of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Manchester University Press, 2023, Jarlath Killeen ).

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six 'versions' of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children's bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.

Dublin Tales, eds. Paul Delaney and Eve Patten (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Dublin is one of the world’s great literary cities, and Dublin Tales is illustrative of this. The book comprises a rich selection of city-centred stories from across the last 120 years. The collection features work by literary eminences as well as by lesser-known writers, and places celebrated texts alongside newly commissioned material. It also includes bilingual versions of two stories, published in Irish and in English. Dublin Tales is bookended by an extensive introduction and an annotated bibliography, and is part of OUP’s international ‘City Tales’ series.

Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, eds. Jarlath Killeen and Christina Morin ( Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Irish Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion provides a comprehensive account of the extent to which Gothic can be traced in Irish cultural life from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century, across both elite and popular genres, and through a range of different media, including literature, cinema, and folklore. It responds, in particular, to the understanding that Gothic is ubiquitous in Irish literature. Rather than focus specifically or exclusively on the oft-studied Irish Gothic foursome – Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker – this companion turns attention to overlooked ‘minor’ figures such as Regina Maria Roche, Stephen Cullen, and Anne Fuller. At the same time, it considers the multi-generic nature of Irish Gothic, thinking beyond fiction and, in particular, the novel, as the Gothic genre par excellence. The collection thus affords fresh perspectives on Irish Gothic and its pervasiveness in Irish culture from the eighteenth century to today.

The Nation in British Literature and Culture, ed. Andrew Murphy (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

The Nation in British Literature and Culture charts the emergence of Britain as a political, social and cultural construct, examining the manner in which its constituent elements were brought together through a process of amalgamation and conquest. The fashioning of the nation through literature and culture is examined, as well as counter-narratives that have sought to call national orthodoxies into question. As part of the First Folio celebrations an exhibition was created at Google Cultural Institute (https://artsandculture.google.com/story/_AUBn0dLV16w2A) .

Arthur Conan Doyle, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, ed. Jarlath Killeen (Oxford University Press, 2023).

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is now best remembered for its concluding story in which the great detective appears to plunge to his death into the waters at the bottom of the Reichenbach Falls, locked in a struggle with his nemesis, Professor Moriarty. However, the collection also brings the reader back to the beginnings of Holmes' career, involving a mutiny at sea and a treasure hunt in a Sussex country house, and a first encounter with Holmes' older brother Mycroft, of whom Holmes says, "If the art of the detective began and ended in reasoning from any armchair, my brother would be the greatest criminal agent that ever lived". This collection includes some of the detective's greatest cases, such as 'Silver Blaze' and 'The Naval Treaty', and even one case which Holmes fails to solve. Edited with an introduction by Jarlath Killeen, this volume examines Holmes as a safeguard against social breakdown and chaos, as well as an agent of justice and goodness against the forces of evil. It also situates the collection in the growth of life writing in the period, and explores the ways in which Holmes became increasingly 'real' to readers as more details about his personality and biography are revealed in the stories.

300,000 KISSES: Tales of Queer Love in the Ancient World, Seán Hewitt and Luke Edward Hall (Particular, 2023).

For centuries, evidence of queer love in the ancient world was ignored or suppressed. Even today, only a few, famous narratives are widely known - yet there's a rich literary tradition of Greek and Roman love that extends far beyond this handful of stories. Here, the poet Seán Hewitt and painter Luke Edward Hall collect together, for the first time, forty of the most exhilarating queer tales in the classical canon and bring them newly to life. A ground-breaking anthology that changes the way we see the ancient world - and invites us to reflect on the puritanism of our own - 300,000 Kisses is a riotous celebration of desire in all its forms.

ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE, Seán Hewitt (Jonathan Cape, 2022).

A luminous memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a tender exploration of queer identity. When Seán meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face to face with crisis. Wrestling with this, Seán Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of solace and hope. All Down Darkness Wide is a mesmerising story of heartache and renewal, and a fearless exploration of a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds.

WINNER OF THE ROONEY PRIZE FOR IRISH LITERATURE 2022

Annotations to James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’, Sam Slote, Marc Mamigonian, John Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

James Joyce's Ulysses is filled with all sorts of references that can get in the way of many of its readers. This volume, with over 12,000 individual annotations (and more than double the word count of Ulysses itself), explains these references and allusions in a clear and compact manner and is designed to be accessible to novices and scholars alike. The annotations cover the full range of information referenced in Ulysses: a vast array of literary allusions, such as Shakespeare, Aristotle, Dante, Aquinas, slang from various eras and areas, foreign language words and phrases, Hiberno-English expressions, Catholic ritual and theology, Irish histories, Theosophy, Freemasonry, cricket, astronomy, fashion, boxing, heraldry, the symbolism of tattoos, horse racing, advertising slogans, nursery rhymes, superstitions, music-hall songs, references to Dublin topography precise enough for a city directory, and much more besides.

The California Gothic in Fiction and Film Bernice M. Murphy, (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

This book positions the ‘California Gothic’ as a highly significant regional subgenre which articulates anxieties specific to the historical, cultural and geographical characteristics of the ‘Golden State’. California has long been perceived as a utopian space, but it is also haunted by the spectres of European and Anglo-American imperialism, genocide, racial and economic discrimination, natural disaster and aggressive infrastructural and commercial development. Drawing on the work of California historians and cultural commentators, this study explores the ways in which the nightmarish flipside of the ‘California Dream’ has been depicted within horror and Gothic.

Twentieth-Century Gothic, Edinburgh, eds. Bernice Murphy and Sorcha Ni Fhlainn (Edinburgh University Press, 2022)

During the latter half of the twentieth century the Gothic emerged as one of the liveliest and most significant areas of academic inquiry within literary, film, and popular culture studies. This volume covers the key concepts and developments associated with Twentieth-Century Gothic, tracing the development of the mode from the fin de siècle to 9/11. The eighteen chapters reflect the interdisciplinary and ever-evolving nature of the Gothic, which, during the century, migrated from literature and drama to the cinema and television.

The Literary Papers of the Reverend Jermyn Pratt (1723-1791), eds. Ema Vyroubalová and James Robert Wood (Norfolk Record Society, 2022)

Jermyn Pratt (1723-1791) was a highly idiosyncratic writer of comic and satirical literature. This volume presents an edition of Pratt’s literary work, much of which has only been available in manuscript. The editors’ introduction presents Pratt’s biography and also provides an analysis of Pratt’s writings, setting them in the contexts of anxieties about commercialisation and the changing social order in the Norfolk countryside, opposition to the American War of Independence, and debates over the role of the clergy in the Anglican church. The volume begins with Pratt’s unpublished five-act play The Grange (?1771), especially interesting for the way it incorporates the Norfolk dialect. The poetry section presents three longer poems: The Inundation or the Life of a Fen-Man (1771), portrayal of the precarious life in the Norfolk fens, September: A Rural Poem (1780), Pratt’s satire on hunting, and The Coal-Heavers (1774), a mock epic about a riot in King’s Lynn. Twelve shorter poems reveal Pratt’s interest in the relationship between the human and natural worlds in rural Norfolk. The final section of prose writings includes the tract A Modest Address to Lewis Lord Bishop of Norwich (c. 1784) and the playful essay The Zgubbs, a mock-serious disquisition on the mischievous sprites Pratt calls “Zgubbs,” who are supposedly responsible for the small mishaps that plague daily life.

J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism by Seán Hewitt (Oxford University Press, 2021)

This book is a complete re-assessment of the works of J.M. Synge, one of Ireland's major playwrights. The book offers the first complete consideration of all of Synge's major plays and prose works in nearly 30 years, drawing on extensive archival research to offer innovative new readings. Much work has been done in recent years to uncover Synge's modernity and to emphasise his political consciousness. This book builds on this re-assessment, undertaking a full systematic exploration of Synge's published and unpublished works. Tracing his journey from an early Romanticism through to the more combative modernism of his later work, the book's innovative methodology treats text as process, and considers Synge's reading materials, his drafts, letters, diaries, and journalism, turning up exciting and unexpected revelations. Thus, Synge's engagement with occultism, pantheism, socialism, Darwinism, and even a late reaction against eugenic nationalisms, are all brought into the critical discussion.

Breaking new ground in ascertaining the tenets of Synge's spirituality, and his aesthetic and political idealization of harmony with nature, the book also builds on new work in modernist studies, arguing that Synge can be understood as a leftist modernist, exhibiting many of the key concerns of early modernism, but routing them through a socialist politics. A timely and thorough study of one of Ireland's most controversial writers, this is an exciting contribution to studies of the Irish Revival, and to modernist studies more broadly.

James Joyce and the Arts, eds. Emma-Louise Silva, Sam Slote, Dirk Van Hulle (Leiden: Brill, 2020)

Joyce’s art is an art of idiosyncratic transformation, revision and recycling. More specifically, the work of his art lies in the act of creative transformation: the art of the paste that echoes Ezra Pound’s urge to make it new. The essays in this volume examine various modalities of the Joycean aesthetic metamorphosis: be it through the prism of Joyce engaging with other arts and artists, or through the prism of other arts and artists engaging with the Joycean aftermath. We have chosen the essays that best show the range of Joycean engagement with multiple artistic domains in a variety of media. Joyce’s art is multiform and protean: influenced by many, it influences many others.

Trials of Nature: The Infinite Law Court of Milton's Paradise Lost, by Björn Quiring (Routledge, 2020)

Focusing on John Milton’s Paradise Lost , this book investigates the metaphorical identification of nature with a court of law – an old and persistent trope, haunted by ancient aporias, at the intersection of jurisprudence, philosophy and literature. In an enormous variety of texts, from the Greek beginnings of Western literature onward, nature has been described as a courtroom in which an all- encompassing trial takes place and a universal verdict is executed. The first, introductory part of this study sketches an overview of the metaphor’s development in European history, from antiquity to the seventeenth century. In its second, more extensive part, the book concentrates on Milton’s epic Paradise Lost in which the problem of the natural law court finds one of its most fascinating and detailed articulations. Using conceptual tools provided by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Hans Blumenberg, Gilles Deleuze, William Empson and Alfred North Whitehead, the study demonstrates that the conflicts in Milton’s epic revolve around the tension between a universal legal procedure inherent in nature and the positive legal decrees of the deity.

Formations of the Formless: Chaos from the Ancient World to Early Modernity, eds. Andreas Höfele, Christoph Levin, Reinhard Müller, and Björn Quiring (De Gruyter, 2020)

Chaos is a perennial source of fear and fascination. The original "formless void" precedes the created world as a state of anarchy before the establishment of cosmic order. However, Chaos has frequently also been conceived of as a force that persists in the cosmos and in society, threatening to undo them both, but at the same time sustaining them in strange, indirect ways. Since antiquity, notions of the divine have included the power to check and contain Chaos as well as to unleash it as a sanction for the violation of social and ethical norms. And Chaos has furthermore been construed as a region of pure potentiality at the base of reality that provides the raw material of creation or even constitutes a kind of alternative order. Focusing on the connection between the cosmic and the political, this volume traces continuities and re-conceptualizations of Chaos across a variety of cultures, discourses and texts. Its eleven essays explore the transformations of Chaos from Hesiod’s Theogony and the Bible to Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Hobbes.

Antarctica in British Children's Literature, by Sinéad Moriarty (Routledge, 2020)

For over a century British authors have been writing about the Antarctic for child readers, yet this body of literature has never been explored in detail. Antarctica in British Children’s Literature examines this field for the first time, identifying the dominant genres and recurrent themes and tropes while interrogating how this landscape has been constructed as a wilderness within British literature for children.

The text is divided into two sections. Part I focuses on the stories of early-twentieth-century explorers such as Robert F. Scott and Ernest Shackleton. Antarctica in British Children’s Literature highlights the impact of children’s literature on the expedition writings of Robert Scott, including the influence of Scott’s close friend, author J.M. Barrie. The text also reveals the important role of children’s literature in the contemporary resurgence of interest in Scott’s long-term rival Ernest Shackleton. Part II focuses on fictional narratives set in the Antarctic, including early-twentieth-century whaling literature, adventure and fantasy texts, contemporary animal stories and environmental texts for children. Together these two sections provide an insight into how depictions of this unique continent have changed over the past century, reflecting transformations in attitudes towards wilderness and wild landscapes.

Irish Literature in Transition, 1940-1980, ed. Eve Patten (Cambridge University Press, 2020)

This volume explores the history of Irish writing between the Second World War (or the 'Emergency') in 1939 and the re-emergence of violence in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. It situates modern Irish writing within the contexts of cultural transition and transnational connection, often challenging pre-existing perceptions of Irish literature in this period as stagnant and mundane. While taking into account the grip of Irish censorship and cultural nationalism during the mid-twentieth century, these essays identify an Irish literary culture stimulated by international political horizons and fully responsive to changes in publishing, readership, and education. The book combines valuable cultural surveys with focussed discussions of key literary moments, and of individual authors such as Seán O'Faoláin, Samuel Beckett, Edna O'Brien, and John McGahern.

Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt (Cape, 2020)

In this collection, Seán Hewitt gives us poems of a rare musicality and grace. By turns searing and meditative, these are lyrics concerned with the matter of the world, its physicality, but also attuned to the proximity of each moment, each thing, to the spiritual.

Here, there is sex, grief, and loss, but also a committed dedication to life, hope and renewal. Drawing on the religious, the sacred and the profane, this is a collection in which men meet in the woods, where matter is corrupted and remade. There are prayers, hymns, vespers, incantations, and longer poems which attempt to propel themselves towards the transcendent.

In this book, there is always the sense of fragility allied with strength, a violence harnessed and unleashed. The collection ends with a series of elegies for the poet's father: in the face of despair, we are met with a fierce brightness, and a reclamation of the spiritual. 'This is when / we make God, and speak in his voice.'

Paying close attention to altered states and the consolations and strangeness of the natural world, this is the first book from a major poet.

The Selected Letters of John Berryman, eds. Philip Coleman and Calista McRae (Harvard University Press, 2020)

Beginning with a letter to his parents in 1925 and concluding with a letter sent to the writer Edward Hoagland a few weeks before his death in 1972, The Selected Letters of John Berryman tells the poet’s story in his own words. Edited by Dr Philip Coleman with Dr Calista McRae (New Jersey Institute of Technology), the volume includes more than 600 letters to almost 200 people—editors, family members, students, colleagues, and friends. The exchanges reveal the scope of Berryman’s ambitions, as well as the challenges of practicing his art within the confines of the publishing industry and contemporary critical expectations. Correspondence with Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Delmore Schwartz, Adrienne Rich, Saul Bellow, and other writers demonstrates Berryman’s sustained involvement in the development of literary culture in the post-war United States. The letters show Berryman to be an energetic and generous interlocutor, but they also make plain his struggles with personal and familial trauma, at every stage of his career. Reinforcing the critical and creative interconnectedness of Berryman’s work and personal life, The Selected Letters confirms his place as one of the most original voices of his generation and opens new horizons for appreciating and interpreting his poems.

Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry by Eve Cobain and Philip Coleman (Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers, 2020)

This is the first book to provide comprehensive treatment of Robert Lowell's engagements with Irish poetry. Including original contributions by leading and emerging scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, the essays in the volume explore topics such as Lowell and W.B. Yeats, Louis MacNeice, and Denis Devlin, as well as the ways in which the American poet's work was read by later Irish poets Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Paul Durcan, Leontia Flynn, and others. In addition to exploring the ways that several poets have engaged with Lowell, the book encompasses a wide range of thematic concerns, from Lowell and ecology to the politics of identification. The book also includes essays on aspects of Lowell's engagements with Irish-American contexts, as well as contributions by contemporary poets Gerald Dawe, Paul Muldoon and Julie O'Callaghan. Robert Lowell and Irish Poetry concludes with a previously unpublished introduction Seamus Heaney gave to a reading by Lowell in Ireland in 1975, which is followed by a reminiscence by Marie Heaney.

British Detective Fiction 1891-1901 by Clare Clarke (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

This book examines the developments in British serial detective fiction which took place in the seven years when Sherlock Holmes was dead. In December 1893, at the height of Sherlock’s popularity with the Strand Magazine’s worldwide readership, Arthur Conan Doyle killed off his detective. At the time, he firmly believed that Holmes would not be resurrected. This book introduces and showcases a range of Sherlock’s most fascinating successors, exploring the ways in which a huge range of popular magazines and newspapers clamoured to ensnare Sherlock’s bereft fans. The book’s case-study format examines a range of detective series-- created by L.T. Meade; C.L. Pirkis; Arthur Morrison; Fergus Hume; Richard Marsh; Kate and Vernon Hesketh-Prichard— that filled the pages of a variety of periodicals, from plush monthly magazines to cheap newspapers, in the years while Sherlock was dead.

Seamus Heaney and Society by Rosie Lavan (Oxford University Press, 2020)

Throughout his career in poetry, Seamus Heaney maintained roles in education and was a visible presence in the print and broadcast media. Seamus Heaney and Society presents a dynamic new engagement with one of the most celebrated poets of the modern period, examining the ways in which his work as a poet was shaped by his work as a teacher, lecturer, critic, and public figure. Drawing on a range of archival material, this book revives the varied contexts within which Heaney's work was written, published, and circulated. Mindful of the different spheres which surrounded his pursuit of poetry, it assesses his achievements and status in Ireland, Britain, and the United States through close analysis of his work in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television, and manuscript drafts of key writings now held in the National Library of Ireland.

The Sound of the Shuttle: Essays on Cultural Belonging and Protestantism in Northern Ireland by Gerald Dawe (Irish Academic Press, 2020)

The Sound of the Shuttle is a eloquent and compelling selection of essays written over four decades by Belfast-born poet Gerald Dawe, exploring the difficult and at times neglected territory of cultural belonging and northern Protestantism. The title, taken from a letter of John Keats during a journey through the north-east in 1818, evokes the lives, now erased from history, of the thousands of workers in the linen industry, tobacco factories and shipyards of Belfast. Sketching in literary, social and political contexts to widen the frame of reference, Dawe offers fascinating insights into the current debate about a ‘New Ireland’ by bringing into critical focus the experiences, beliefs and achievements of an (at times) maligned and often misread community, generally referred to as Northern protestants. In making the telling point that ‘The jagged edges of the violent past are still locked within ideological vices’, The Sound of the Shuttle is an insightful and honest report based upon many years of creative and critical practice. An essential book for our changing times.

Aesop’s Fables, The Cruelty of the Gods by Carlo Gébler with illustrations by Gavin Weston (New Island (Ireland) and Head of Zeus (UK), 2019)

Aesop is widely regarded as a writer who promoted such values as honesty and punctuality, diligence and hard work, duty and forbearance. This isn’t true: the idea that we should be all of the above and more is what the popularizers of his work have imposed on him for their own reasons. Aesop’s actual message, rather differently, is that we should always look behind agreed nostrums and moral platitudes to see what is really going on, and that is what this new version of his fables by Carlo Gébler with illustrations by Gavin Weston seeks to do – to render back to the fables the quality of truth telling before they had before the moralisers got hold of them. And the reason for doing this of course is that though Aesop wrote a long time ago his texts have a lot to say to us in the troubled world in which we find ourselves living today.