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 are often quoted outside of the […]
The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the leading figures in second-generation Romanticism. Along with his contemporaries Byron and Keats, Shelley led the way in English Romanticism.
Eric Arthur Blair (1903-50), who is better-known to the world as George Orwell, was one of the leading English essayists of the first half of the twentieth century, writing about everything from the Spanish Civil War to the ideal pub to how to make a perfect cup of tea. Of […]
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), born Adeline Virginia Stephen, was one of the most important writers of the first half of the twentieth century. A leading modernist novelist and short-story writer whose novels Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves are widely regarded as classics, Woolf was also an influential […]
The nineteenth-century poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92) is probably the best-known poet of the Victorian era. His work was read by Queen Victoria, and he was the longest-serving Poet Laureate in the United Kingdom, holding the post from 1850 until his death in 1892. Tennyson’s work is very quotable, and […]