Today is Tolkien Reading Day, an annual event launched in 2003 by the Tolkien Society. (The date of 25 March was chosen in honour of the fall of Sauron in the Third Age, year 3019, in Tolkien’s fiction.) The reading day promotes the use of Tolkien’s writing in schools and library […]
In this guest blog post, Christopher Hart provides a reading of a short and interesting poem by John Donne, ‘A Burnt Ship’. Out of a fired ship, which by no way But drowning could be rescued from the flame, Some men leap’d forth, and ever as they came Near the […]
Today is International Day of Happiness, so we’ve compiled 20 of our favourite quotes from writers about happiness, joy, pleasure, and related emotions. We hope you enjoy them! ‘Happiness in the ordinary sense is not what one needs in life, though one is right to aim at it. The true […]
The following facts about T. S. Eliot’s life and work are designed as a quick ‘way in’ to discovering more about him. For those who’d like to learn more about Eliot’s life, we’d recommend Lyndall Gordon’s excellent biography, The Imperfect Life of T. S. Eliot. But in the meantime, we […]
1. One of Douglas Adams’s early jobs was as a bodyguard to a Qatari family of oil tycoons. He also had a job cleaning a chicken-shed at one point. The ‘eureka moment’ for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came when he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria in the early 1970s. […]