My favourite baiter Willy back at it again! Imagine you go to see this in the 16th century and for solid two acts and a half you're thinking what a jolly rom-com with cartoonish characters and loads of sex jokes, only to be hit like a brick with a bloody septuple of deaths.

Socrates, sassy as ever, goes to show Protagoras his place. Obviously, Protagoras gets obliterated, but Socrates admits he also learned something new (blink and you miss it). Note a moment during which Socrates is on the verge of a full-blown panic attack when he suspects he might be wrong for a second (339d, e). Anyway, the main points are: knowledge is the core of all virtue, “sophist” is a slur, and young men are just so beautiful.

A bit boring at the beginning (unless you are a massive dog fan, I guess) but it picks up in the second half.

‘Man can be a real friend to a dog but eventually, he will need his pack’ is a nice message albeit not totally biologically validated. Same goes for the stress on the strongest fighter being the head of the dog/wolf pack; the leaders are often the oldest ones, the fathers and providers, not the ones who fight the fiercest. Similarly, animals rarely fight to dead when establishing dominance within their group, they can measure their strength without causing harm. But this is something that might only bother me.

The themes of critique of the “civilised” when faced with the wild, and the anthropomorphising of the animals make a lot of sense within the context of London’s experience during the Klondike Gold Rush. I can clearly picture him being confronted with how little his education and experience up to that point mattered in the Canadian wilderness. And I can also see him losing his mind a little bit amongst the endless fields of snow and making up elaborate inner worlds and backstories for the dogs which kept him company.

‘The Call of the Wild’ is an interesting little novel to have come from this very specific era of American history.

This novella is assumed to be at least partially autobiographical recollection of Rossetti’s youth. Maude is sickly, frail, and ridden with guilt over nothing at all, and she is often to be found surrounded by a “chaos of stationary”. At times though, she still feels like a regular teenager when she is getting ready with her cousins or when she is angstilly fed up with everybody around. But over all, Maude, Rossetti, and this novel are as Victorian as it gets; death and suffering peek out from every verse, both in a theme of melancholy and piousness, but also in a purely Poesque revelling in the macabre.