In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kristin Swenson’s fascinating and accessible introduction to the Bible In the earliest New Testament writings, the mother of Jesus doesn’t even have a name. Paul says simply that Jesus was born from a woman, and there are very […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews James Raven’s erudite and informative history of that ubiquitous invention, the book In the Exeter Book, one of the jewels in the crown of Anglo-Saxon literature, a riddle appears which begins: Some enemy deprived me of my life […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Asimov’s second Robot novel which eerily prefigures our world On the planet of Solaria, people don’t ‘see’ each other: ‘seeing’ is viewed as abnormal, even dirty, because it means coming into contact with other people’s breath, germs, and […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle introduces his own venture into the world of poetry At the beginning of 2020 I had little faith in this Government, but it turns out I was stupidly optimistic. Johnson (‘agent of chaos’, as I like to call him, […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle celebrates one of the great science-fiction achievements of the 1960s What’s the most prophetic book you can name? Nostradamus’ notebooks? In my book The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, which gave its name to this […]