In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the surprising origins of a well-known phrase
Let’s begin this week’s Secret Library column with a quiz question. Which famous writer gave us the phrase ‘one for all, or all for one’? To make it easier, let’s make it multiple-choice. Was it: a) William Shakespeare; b) Alexandre Dumas; or c) Virgil?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ is one of dozens of famous expressions that have entered common speech, but which originated in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The old quip about Hamlet, that it’s ‘too full of quotations’, wittily sums up the play’s influence on not just English literature but on the everyday language we use.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The Waste Land is one of the major poems of the twentieth century. Published in 1922, T. S. Eliot’s landmark work of modernism may ‘only’ be just over 430 lines or around 20 pages in length, but its scope and vision are epic in terms of historical and geographical range, spanning from modern-day London to the deserts of the Old Testament.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
One of the most famous poems by T. S. Eliot is ‘The Hollow Men’. One of the most famous sections of poetry in all of T. S. Eliot is the fifth and final section of ‘The Hollow Men’, which contains the famous lines, which state that ‘between the idea and the reality falls the shadow’. But what do these lines mean?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
For most of us, nursery rhymes are the first poems we ever encounter in life. They can teach us about rhythm, and about constructing a story in verse, and, occasionally, they impart important moral lessons to us. More often than not, though, they make no sense at all.