‘Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away’ is a song from Shakespeare’s ‘problem play’, Measure for Measure. It’s not as famous as some of the Bard’s other songs, but it’s been praised and singled out as among the best of them, notably by the poet A. E. Housman. Here’s the text […]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a lyrical early novel by Patricia McKillip Sybel, a teenage girl living all alone among the mountains, spends her days caring for a menagerie of mythical creatures, including a cat, a falcon, and a boar, until a man […]
‘Prelude’ is one of Katherine Mansfield’s longest, and finest, short stories. Centring on the Burnell family as they move house in New Zealand, ‘Prelude’ is the opening story in Katherine Mansfield’s first ‘mature’ collection of fiction, Bliss and Other Stories (1920), although the story had first been published two years […]