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 […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Guy Boothby’s fiendish fin de siècle creation What happens if you cross Professor Moriarty with his arch-nemesis Sherlock Holmes, add in a bit of Svengali from George du Maurier’s Trilby, a dash of archetypal James Bond villain, and […]