In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the surprising origins of that ‘a lie is halfway round the world …’ quotation
‘A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on.’ The line well-known, and has itself made its way round probably more than half the world since it was first uttered. But who first uttered it?
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses one of the most famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
‘April is the cruellest month’ – the five words which don’t, strictly speaking, constitute the ‘first line’ of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, as I have previously discussed – has become one of the most famous quotations found in twentieth-century poetry. Another celebrated line from Eliot’s 1922 poem, ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’, appears near the end of the 434-line modernist poem. And the meaning of the latter quotation is almost as elusive.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the meaning and history of a famous phrase
We’ve doubtless all heard the phrase ‘Achilles heel’. It is used to refer to an otherwise strong person’s one weak spot, and references a story from Greek mythology concerning the great hero Achilles. Here’s a brief summary of the Achilles story:
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the famous line from Orwell: ‘some animals are more equal than others’
Animal Farm very nearly didn’t make it into print at all. First, not long after Orwell completed the first draft in February 1944, his flat on Mortimer Crescent in London was bombed in June, and he feared the typescript had been destroyed. Orwell later found it in the rubble. Then, Orwell had difficulty finding a publisher. T. S. Eliot, at Faber and Faber, rejected it.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the meaning of a strange Shakespearean quotation
Let’s start with two correctives to common misconceptions about Romeo and Juliet.