By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’. The phrase has the ring of proverb about it, and most proverbs don’t have an author: they’re anonymous nuggets of wisdom handed down from generation to generation, part of an oral rather than written tradition. But we […]
Interesting little-known tips for how to write a better English Literature essay from Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) How do you write a good English Literature essay? Although to an extent this depends on the particular subject you’re writing about, and on the nature of the question your essay is […]
An introduction to T. S. Eliot’s life and work We could write thousands of words as part of a T. S. Eliot biography, but instead we’ll limit ourselves to a reasonably short piece that distils all of the most interesting aspects of Eliot’s life into one relatively brief post. What […]
By Patrick Smith “The term ‘Movement’—and it’s always written with a capital ‘M’—has always given me the heebie-jeebies, it’s very pretentious,” science-fiction icon William Gibson told Andy Diggle in a 1997 interview. “I was so taken aback the first time I heard the word ‘Cyberpunk.’” Of course, since Gibson’s meteoric […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) What happens in Beowulf, the jewel in the crown of Anglo-Saxon poetry? The title of the poem is probably the most famous thing about it – that, and the fact that a monster named Grendel features at some point. But because the specific details […]