By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare’s most perennially popular and widely studied plays. Its story of ‘star-cross’d lovers’, whose love for each other is doomed from the start because they belong to rival families in the Italian city of Verona, is one of […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) If, as the old quip has it, Hamlet is a great play but it has too many quotations in it, a similar charge might be laid against Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. So many lines in the play have become proverbial and […]
Queen Elizabeth I’s speech to the troops at Tilbury is among the most famous and iconic speeches in English history. On 9 August 1588, Elizabeth addressed the land forces which had been mobilised at the port of Tilbury in Essex, in preparation for the expected invasion of England by the […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is one of the fairy tales for children written by the Irish author Oscar Wilde (1854-1900). It was published in the 1888 collection The Happy Prince and Other Tales. ‘The Remarkable Rocket’ is about a firework which is set to be […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Love is obviously a key subject in much classic poetry. But what are the best sensual love poems ever written: those poems which carry an erotic frisson which speaks of desire as well as devotion? Below, we select and introduce some of the very […]