Stephen Regan

Stephen Regan is Professor Emeritus at Durham University and also a research associate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He previously taught at Ruskin College, Oxford and Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (OUP, 2004), The Sonnet (OUP, 2019) and The Penguin Book of Elegy, co-edited with Andrew Motion in 2023 (reviewed in ABR in May 2024). He is currently editing three volumes of The Oxford History of Poetry in English.

Stephen Regan reviews ‘The English Soul: Faith of a nation’ by Peter Ackroyd

January–February 2025, no. 472 • 17 December 2024

The English Soul is a history of Christianity in England from the Venerable Bede to the present, a period of roughly 1,400 years. Its enthralling journey leads us from the medieval mystics, including Julian of Norwich, through the torments of the English Reformation and the exhilarating spread of revivalist and evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the charismatic Ch ... (read more)

Stephen Regan reviews ‘Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life’ by Fintan O’Toole

October 2024, no. 469 • 25 September 2024

In the dying days of the ignominious Conservative government that he led from 2019 to 2022, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared his fall to that of Shakespeare’s Othello. ‘It is the essence of all tragic literature,’ he claimed, ‘that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.’ Fint ... (read more)

Stephen Regan reviews ‘The Letters of Seamus Heaney’ edited by Christopher Reid

July 2024, no. 466 • 21 June 2024

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The ... (read more)