In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the surprising origins of a well-known phrase
Let’s begin this week’s Secret Library column with a quiz question. Which famous writer gave us the phrase ‘one for all, or all for one’? To make it easier, let’s make it multiple-choice. Was it: a) William Shakespeare; b) Alexandre Dumas; or c) Virgil?
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle looks into the origins of a famous Shakespeare quotation
‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much’ is a phrase people sometimes use in jest, especially the sort of folk who are fond of talking of heading to the nearest hostelry for flagons of ale and addressing each other as ‘good sir’. The meaning of the phrase is relatively straightforward, but what about its origins?
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of the phrase ‘dark horse’ in a forgotten nineteenth-century novel
The novel The Young Duke may have been forgotten, but its author hasn’t been – even if his reputation as an author is not now as high as it once was. To make sense of this – and to discover what it has to do with the origins of the new well-known phrase, ‘dark horse’ – we need to go back to 1831.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle delves into the literary origins of a well-known phrase
The phrase ‘cloud cuckoo land’ is well known, but what are its origins? Here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) says, for the term’s etymology:
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the interesting theatrical origins of a famous phrase
What does it mean to ‘steal one’s thunder’? The phrase is well-known, but its origins are less so. And to delve into the history of this now common phrase, we need to go into the theatre.