By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The late Terry Pratchett once wrote that if cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. ‘Style,’ he went on. ‘That’s what people remember.’ Pratchett himself was a cat-lover who was surrounded by his family pet when he died in 2015. Many writers have been cat people. But what about songwriters?
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Love them or hate them, our schooldays are formative and, as the old cliché has it, make us what we are today, for good or ill. Many of the greatest and most famous popular songs written about schooldays don’t pull any punches about the harsh realities of school life – and one or two of the tracks I’ve chosen here see the teachers wielding their fists themselves.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Yellow is a curious colour. It carries some interesting symbolism: although it’s a ‘warm’ colour associated with brightness and joy and hope, it can also carry connotations of sickness and pallor: having a ‘sallow’ complexion isn’t usually a good sign, and sallowness denotes a pale yellowish hue.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Until now, we’ve largely been concerned with selecting some of the best poems by famous poets – everyone from Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, Coleridge to Carol Ann Duffy. But since Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016, after literary critics like Sir Christopher Ricks had championed Dylan’s poetic song-writing for decades, we’ve begun thinking about music and poetry, songs as well as sonnets.