The Secret Library

On Quitting Social Media: A Poem

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In lieu of my usual Secret Library column this Friday, an announcement – not a particularly momentous one – and a poem. Yesterday, I made the decision to leave Twitter for good. This is nothing to do with my experience of running the @InterestingLit account (which has, 99.9% of the time, been nothing but positive, and has led to some thoughtful and illuminating comments from like-minded followers), but with the general air of toxicity pervading the site. When I joined in 2009, it was a community of bright-eyed people who wanted to indulge in their nerdy interests and who seemed, universally, to be full of enthusiasm for this new social network which enabled you to spend some time connecting with people you wouldn’t usually meet in ‘real life’.

Sadly, those halcyon days are no more.

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The Meaning and Origin of ‘You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat It’

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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of perhaps the greatest cake-based proverb in the English language

I remember being flummoxed by a number of well-known proverbs when I was very young. The first time I heard ‘a stitch in time saves nine’, I remember scratching my head and thinking, ‘What? A stitch in time saves nine what? Nine lives?’

And then, perhaps because I’d spent too long reading speculative science-fiction novels, I thought ‘stitch in time’ was some elaborate operation performed upon the fabric of time, perhaps to open up a wormhole into the deep future or the past.

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The Meaning and Origin of ‘I Will Show You Fear in a Handful of Dust’

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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the origins of a famous line from The Waste Land

Among many haunting lines in T. S. Eliot’s 1922 poem The Waste Land, ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ stands out for its sinister suggestions of death, mortality, and the ultimate futility of all human endeavour. If the poem as a whole seems to offer a vision of civilisation as a pile of textual rubble or ruins, with all of human achievement in literature, religion, and myth reduced to those ‘fragments’ which the speaker has ‘shored’, then ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ does the same for the human species. But is this a correct analysis of the line’s meaning? What else might it mean?

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The Curious Meaning and Origins of ‘One for All and All for One’

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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?

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The Curious Meaning and Origin of ‘Et Tu, Brute?’

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In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the curious meanings of Julius Caesar’s ‘dying words’

Let’s kick off this week’s Secret Library column with a short quiz about those three famous words: ‘Et tu, Brute?’ Okay, if you’re ready …

Question 1): Which famous Roman emperor uttered these words when he was stabbed by conspirators? Question 2): In which 1590s play does the utterance ‘Et tu, Brute?’ make its debut in drama? And Question 3): What was the definite meaning of Julius Caesar’s utterance, ‘Et tu, Brute?’

If you answered ‘Julius Caesar’ to either 1) or 2), sorry: you’re wrong.

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