‘The Night was wide, and furnished scant’: not one of Emily Dickinson’s most memorable opening lines, but it opens a curious poem which is worth closer analysis. The Night was wide, and furnished scant With but a single Star — That often as a Cloud it met — Blew out […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a minor classic of Anglo-Saxon poetry The Battle of the Blackwater was real and not just something that happened in Game of Thrones. It’s an odd fact that the first great poem written in English about a real […]
Say ‘fox and hedgehog’ and one is likely to think of several things. There is the old proverb, attributed to many people throughout history, that ‘the fox knows many things; the hedgehog, one big thing’. And, building on this idea, there is the philosopher Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay, ‘The Hedgehog […]