‘England in 1819’ is a sonnet by the second-generation English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). It’s one of Shelley’s most angry and politically direct poems, although a number of the allusions Shelley makes to contemporary events require some analysis and interpretation to be fully understood now, more than two […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the interesting theatrical origins of a famous phrase What does it mean to ‘steal one’s thunder’? The phrase is well-known, but its origins are less so. And to delve into the history of this now common phrase, we […]
Othello is one of Shakespeare’s five best-known and widely studied tragedies, along with Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, and Romeo and Juliet. But as is so often with a well-known text, we don’t know this one nearly as well as we think we do: Othello has more in it than jealousy, […]