By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946) is one of the best-known essays by George Orwell (1903-50). As its title suggests, Orwell identifies a link between the (degraded) English language of his time and the degraded political situation: Orwell sees modern discourse (especially political discourse) as being less a matter of words chosen for their clear meanings than a series of stock phrases slung together.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Minister’s Black Veil’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied short stories written by the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. Subtitled ‘A Parable’, the story originally appeared in a gift book titled The Token and Atlantic Souvenir in 1836, before being collected in Hawthorne’s short-story collection Twice-Told Tales, the following year.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of T. S. Eliot’s ‘this is the way the world ends’
‘This is the way the world ends’, T. S. Eliot tells us at the end of his 1925 poem, ‘The Hollow Men’: ‘not with a bang but a whimper.’ The quotation has become famous and is known even to those who never read T. S. Eliot’s poetry, or have never encountered ‘The Hollow Men’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Charles Dickens (1812-70) is best-known for his fifteen novels and for shorter books like A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens’s was a restless talent, and during his publishing career that spanned more than thirty-five years, he also wrote countless articles, essays, and short stories.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ is one of Aesop’s best-known fables. The meaning or ‘moral’ of the fable is worth analysing more closely, however, and the story has attracted a number of competing – indeed, actively conflicting – interpretations. So let’s take a closer look at the meaning of ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ (sometimes known as ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’). But first, how about a quick recap or summary of the fable?
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