By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Envy’ is a poem by Mary Lamb, who is best-remembered for her Tales from Shakespeare which she co-authored with her brother, Charles. But she was also a fine poet, who, in ‘Envy’, presents to us an important truth about the nature of envy and the futility of believing the grass always greener on the other side.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The War of the Worlds is one of H. G. Wells’s early scientific romances: books which helped to lay the groundwork for modern science fiction. One adaptation was supposedly mistaken for a real news broadcast reporting an actual invasion, although we will come to that later on.
The War of the Worlds is probably Wells’s most famous and influential novel, so a few words of analysis are called for to explain precisely why it has become, in some ways, his most defining work.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ These are among the most famous lines in the New Testament: they begin the Gospel of St. John. But what does ‘In the beginning was the Word’ mean? Let’s take a closer look at the meaning of this famous opening sentence.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne’: so begins perhaps the most famous speech from William Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. The words are uttered by Domitius Enobarbus, a follower of Mark Antony, in Act 2 Scene 2, as he describes the appearance of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, when Mark Antony first saw her and fell in love with her as she rode her barge down the river Cydnus.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Tower of Babel is one of the best-known structures mentioned in the Bible. But what was the tower’s purpose, and where was Babel? How much do we really know about this story? In many ways, the Tower of Babel is a kind of ‘just so’ story about how the world came to have many languages. Let’s take a closer look at the legend of the Tower of Babel and offer an analysis of both its religious significance and its historical foundation.