Our pick of the 10 best Philip Larkin poems and why you should read them – selected by Dr Oliver Tearle Trying to create a ‘top ten’ definitive list of Philip Larkin’s best poems is impossible, not least because each Larkin fan will come up with a slightly different list. […]
Fun facts about words and the English language The stuff of literature is, of course, words. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge observed, ‘Prose = words in their best order; – poetry = the best words in the best order.’ In this post, we’ve gathered up 27 of the best facts about […]
Fun facts about Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey – and the writers buried there Although Geoffrey Chaucer was the first to be buried in Poets’ Corner, his interment in that part of the Abbey only took place in 1556, over a century and a half after his death. He had […]
By Luna Gradinšćak One young Serbian artist, Nadija Rebronja, tries to put 21st-century reality into a poetic form, in her Flamenco utopia. Born in 1982, she writes about contemporary life by listening to others in her presence. Whether it is a friend, acquaintance or just some noises on the street, she […]
Fun Mark Twain facts, including his inventions, unusual lecture topics, and numerous pen names 1. Mark Twain wrote a pornographic story set during Elizabethan times. Titled ‘1601’, this bawdy tale – known as a ‘squib’ – was written in 1876 and purports to be the excerpt from a diary written […]