By Laura Inman John Keats lived for twenty-five years, from 1795 to 1821. He is considered one of the great Romantic poets, along with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley. Unlike those other poets of his era, most notably in contrast with Byron and Shelly, Keats was a middle-class commoner, whose parents were inn keepers, a … Read more
What follows are 20 of our favourite quotes about just about everything under the sun. By turns witty, poignant, and hilarious, they are always nothing short of eloquent. We hope you enjoy these quotes (or ‘quotations’, if you’re a purist!). Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t so much matter what … Read more
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was once described as the last person to have read everything, so steeped in literature, philosophy, and learning was he. Certainly, he gave us a very useful phrase concerning good fiction: the expression ‘suspension of disbelief’ is a coinage of his, and describes the unofficial contract we all enter into when we read, or watch, fictional narratives.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Robin Hood is first mentioned in print in the late fourteenth-century poem Piers Plowman, which is commonly attributed to William Langland, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Sometimes authors don’t shuffle off this mortal coil quietly or – for want of a better word – normally. Sometimes they meet a sticky and untimely end, and sometimes myths build up around an author’s demise and we come to accept legend as fact. So what follows is part blog post, part quiz: we present you with nine of the most unusual author deaths, and then underneath we tell you whether the nature of that death is factually correct or not.