Interesting Literature

Daemons and Dust: Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys the first volume of Philip Pullman’s new trilogy The Book of Dust

In Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time, a physicist takes issue with a modern author, arguing that ‘Shakespeare would have grasped wave functions’ and John Donne ‘would have understood complementarity and relative time’. In writing about these new scientific developments of the twentieth century, ‘they would have educated their audiences too.’ But modern writers, for McEwan’s scientist, are too obsessed with developments in the arts at the cost of the exciting discoveries and debates going on in other fields of human endeavour.

A Short Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s ‘The String Quartet’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The String Quartet’ was published in Virginia Woolf’s short-story collection Monday or Tuesday in 1921. As we remarked in our summary of the story on Tuesday, it’s one of Woolf’s strongest evocations of music and its links to memory and imagination. You can read ‘The String Quartet’ here before proceeding to our analysis of the story below.

Five of the Best Poems about Furniture

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Poets are well-known for writing about the natural world, of course, but less famous for composing poems about man-made objects like beds, chairs, and tables. Yet furniture carries a number of connotations – of the everyday, the homely, and the ordinary and down-to-earth – which poets have been able to draw on from time to time. Here, then, are five of our favourite poems about furniture.

‘The String Quartet’: A Summary of the Virginia Woolf Story

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The String Quartet’, which was published in Virginia Woolf’s short-story collection Monday or Tuesday in 1921, is one of her strongest evocations of music and its links to memory and imagination. You can read ‘The String Quartet’ here before proceeding to our summary of the story’s ‘plot’ below.

A Summary and Analysis of Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Rupert Brooke wrote ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ in May 1912, while he was staying in Germany. Before we offer a summary of the fifth verse paragraphs which make up the poem, you might want to read the poem first, and keep the tab containing the text of the poem in a separate window (we find this useful anyway, when reading about longer poems).

You can read ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ here.