By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
George Orwell (1903-50) is one of the twentieth century’s most quotable writers. Although many of his most repeated statements come from his essays or from his final novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, a few of his most famous quotations are found in his 1945 novella, Animal Farm.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Often known simply as ‘Daffodils’ or ‘The Daffodils’, William Wordsworth’s lyric poem that begins ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ is, in many ways, the quintessential English Romantic poem.
Its theme is the relationship between the individual and the natural world, though those daffodils are obviously the most memorable image from the poem. Here is the poem we should probably correctly call ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, along with a short analysis of its themes, meaning, and language.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die’: these lines have become famous, although they’re often misquoted. The quotation originated in the 1854 poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ written by the UK Poet Laureate of the time, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92).
Tennyson, who was Poet Laureate for a record 42 years, wrote the poem in response to a very specific event, and it was this event that inspired the lines, ‘Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die’. Let’s take a look at the poem, and the event.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ has a curious claim to fame: it’s thought to be the first short story to contain a robotic insect. This intriguing tale is layered and rich in symbolism, so like so many of Hawthorne’s stories it requires some careful close analysis.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
According to Oscar Wilde, ‘The Book of Life begins with a man and a woman in a garden. It ends with Revelations.’ But as with many stories from the Bible, there are many things we get wrong about that ‘man and woman in a garden’, Adam and Eve.
Where was the Garden of Eden? And was Eden the name of the garden of merely the location of it? What did the serpent represent, and what was the forbidden fruit hanging from the Tree of Knowledge?