By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In my day job as a teacher in a university, I teach a final-year undergraduate module which bears the subtitle ‘The Modern Poet from T. S. Eliot to Sylvia Plath’. These two figures, and their very distinct bodies of work, effectively ‘bookend’ a module which runs from the birth of modern poetry in the immediate pre-WWI years right through to the Cold War and the swinging sixties.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Stolen Bacillus’ is an 1894 short story by the British writer H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Between the mid-1890s and the mid-1900s, Wells wrote much of his best work, with a strong commitment to storytelling perfectly wedded to interesting ideas and theories.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What does the word ‘sinister’ have to do with being left-handed? And what was the meaning of the word ‘ambidextrous’ when it was first coined? And what do these two questions have to do with each other? Let’s take a closer look at the interesting origins of the word ‘sinister’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Deal in Ostriches’ is a short tale by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), originally published on 20 December 1894 in the Pall Mall Gazette before being republished in Wells’s first short-story collection, The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, a year later.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘While the Auto Waits’ is a short story by O. Henry (1862-1910), the American author known for his twist endings. The story focuses on an encounter between a man and a woman on a park bench, with the story’s major themes being social class and the gulf between appearance and reality.