In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines the origins of a famous phrase ‘We have nothing to fear except fear itself.’ Those words – and the sentiment they convey – are inextricably bound up with Franklin D. Roosevelt. But what are the origins of the […]
‘How all occasions do inform against me’: so begins one of Hamlet’s most reasoned and level-headed soliloquies in Shakespeare’s play. The soliloquy comes relatively late in Hamlet, in Act IV scene 4, after Hamlet has been dispatched to England by Claudius (ostensibly on a diplomatic mission, but in reality Claudius […]
Given the pandemic the world is currently grappling with, our thoughts here at IL Towers during this lockdown period have, perhaps naturally, turned to plague, pestilence, and pandemics. How did poets of previous generations deal with, and respond to, plague and mass illness? How are poets of today writing about […]