In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a fun new book about the point of reading and studying poetry What is the point of poetry? Do we read it because we enjoy it? Some do; many are still waiting for that one poem to come […]
‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (‘the beautiful lady without mercy’) is one of John Keats’s best-loved and most widely anthologised poems; after his odes, it may well be his most famous. But is this poem with its French title a mere piece of pseudo-medieval escapism, summoning the world of chivalrous […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys some vintage science fiction courtesy of The Best of John Wyndham, 1932-1949 I’ve blogged before about my discovery of John Wyndham’s science fiction in a local charity shop, which had a number of old paperbacks for 99p each. […]