William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116, a popular poem to be read or recited at weddings, ends with the couplet: If this be error, and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
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The Meaning and Origin of ‘They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait’
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of a famous line from John Milton ‘They also serve who only stand and wait.’ This line has the ring of the proverb about it, but rather than being some anonymous piece of hand-me down wisdom, […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbours’
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning of a well-known expression Here’s a question for you: who first wrote the line, ‘good fences make good neighbours’? Although it was the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963) who first used that particular wording, the sentiment, […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls; It Tolls for Thee’
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 […]
The Meaning and Origin of ‘It Was a Bright Cold Day in April, and the Clocks Were Striking Thirteen’
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, […]
