Interesting Literature

The Original Meaning of Liff

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Have you ever heard of a radlett? It’s defined as the ‘single hemisphere of dried pea which is invariably found in an otherwise spotlessly clean saucepan’. Or how about a lulworth, a ‘measure of conversation’ which ‘defines the amount of the length, loudness and embarrassment of a statement you make when everyone else in the room unaccountably stops talking at the same moment’? Or a skoonspruit, the ‘tiny garden sprinkler thing your mouth sometimes does for no apparent reason’?

John Cheever’s ‘The Chaste Clarissa’: An Analysis

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Chaste Clarissa’ (1952) is a story of seduction. Baxter, a promiscuous twice-divorced man, finds himself drawn to a young married redhead named Clarissa while holidaying at Martha’s Vineyard, as is his wont every summer. The story ends with Baxter finally unlocking the key that might – might – just make Clarissa break her marriage vows.

The Curious Story of the Priapus Myth

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Greek mythology is full of randy gods who had, shall we say, rather relaxed attitudes towards things like consent, with Zeus obviously being the grand daddy of them all (not to mention the literal daddy of Apollo, Artemis, Dionysus, Heracles, Hermes, Minos, Persephone, Perseus, and Helen of Troy, to say nothing of nine Muses).

But Zeus, being the king of the gods, clearly set a bad example for the other, lesser gods. And this is perhaps truest of all when it comes to Priapus.

The Curious Story of The Smiths’ ‘Cemetry Gates’

By Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The Queen Is Dead is one of those classic albums on which even the minor tracks take on a kind of epic grandeur.

Undoubtedly the Smiths’ masterpiece (although all four band members expressed a preference for their swansong, Strangeways Here We Come, for the title of ‘best’), this 1986 album contains ten tracks ranging from the classic pop single (‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’), the slow balladesque album track (‘I Know It’s Over’), the uptempo bit of fluff (‘Frankly, Mr Shankly’, ‘Vicar in a Tutu’), and the downright ‘filler’ number (‘Never Had No One Ever’, ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’).

Giles Fletcher’s Licia: A Forgotten Elizabethan Sonnet Sequence

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The focus of this week’s column is an Elizabethan poet who wrote, among other things, a sequence of love sonnets in the early 1590s and a work often referred to, in short, as Richard III. This writer was born in the Tudor era but actually died, in the 1610s, in the Jacobean period. His name was Giles Fletcher, the Elder (c. 1548-1611).