By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
What does the word ‘sinister’ have to do with being left-handed? And what was the meaning of the word ‘ambidextrous’ when it was first coined? And what do these two questions have to do with each other? Let’s take a closer look at the interesting origins of the word ‘sinister’.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘A Deal in Ostriches’ is a short tale by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), originally published on 20 December 1894 in the Pall Mall Gazette before being republished in Wells’s first short-story collection, The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents, a year later.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘While the Auto Waits’ is a short story by O. Henry (1862-1910), the American author known for his twist endings. The story focuses on an encounter between a man and a woman on a park bench, with the story’s major themes being social class and the gulf between appearance and reality.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Hammerpond Park Burglary’ is not one of the best-known short stories by H. G. Wells (1866-1946), but in my determination to read all of his short fiction I thought it worth recording my comments on this slight piece of fiction, even though it has no elements of fantasy or science fiction and is more like a Raffles adventure than a quintessential slice of H. G. Wells’s imaginative fiction.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The words ‘child’ and ‘children’ have had an interesting history. Although we can all easily define ‘child’ now – a young person who had not yet attained adulthood – this definition in itself raises some intriguing questions. Legally, a ‘child’ may be someone under sixteen years of age, or someone under eighteen years of age, depending on the country or context; or some other marker or boundary between ‘childhood’ and ‘adulthood’ may be given.