In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a famous quotation from a classic work of Gothic literature
Here’s a question for you. What is the name of the ‘monster’ in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein?
a) Frankenstein
b) He doesn’t have one
c) Adam
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a famous biblical quotation
According to a story – which may well be apocryphal – Dorothy Parker was about to step through a doorway when another woman (in many versions of the anecdote, it’s the socialite Clare Boothe Luce) remarked, ‘Age before beauty.’ Parker, known for her razor-sharp wit, delivered the riposte, ‘Pearls before swine.’
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the origins of a famous phrase about human sympathy and mortality
‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ This phrase has become world-famous but its origins, and even its meaning, are often misconstrued or at least only partially grasped. Many people would be able to identify the origins of ‘never send to know for whom the bell tolls’ in the work of John Donne (which would be correct), with quite a few of them thinking that the line originated in a poem of Donne’s (which would not be correct).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the famous opening sentence of Orwell’s final novel
‘It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.’ Since those words were first published in 1949, they have joined the pantheon, the literary canon, of great opening lines. They are, without doubt, up there with Austen’s ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’, Dickens’s ‘It was the best of times’, and Melville’s ‘Call me Ishmael’ (which aren’t technically the opening lines of Moby-Dick; but that’s a story for another Friday).
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the prophetic visions of a highly original writer
Say ‘Myths of the Near Future’ to many people and they will think of the album by the Klaxons, but the Klaxons named their 2007 debut after a 1982 collection of short stories by J. G. Ballard (1930-2009), a writer who has joined the ranks of such visionaries as Kafka and Orwell by having an adjective named after him: ‘Ballardian’ is defined by Collins Dictionary as ‘resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels and stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes, and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.’