The Secret Library – Page 7 – Interesting Literature

The Meaning and Origin of ‘Immature Poets Imitate; Mature Poets Steal’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores the origins of a famous quotation from T. S. Eliot

‘Talent borrows; genius steals.’ This four-word slogan has often been attributed to Oscar Wilde, although it wasn’t one of Wilde’s quips. But then Wilde is, like Mark Twain and Winston Churchill, one of those figures who attract quotations the way picnics attract wasps. The broadcaster, writer, and editor Nigel Rees even came up with a term for this habit of attributing all quotations to such figures: ‘Churchillian drift.’

The Meaning and Origin of ‘Age Cannot Wither Her, Nor Custom Stale Her Infinite Variety’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses one of the most famous lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra

‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety’: these words are among the most well-known and oft-quoted from William Shakespeare’s late tragedy, Antony and Cleopatra, about the love affair between Mark Antony and the Queen of Egypt. But what precisely do these lines mean? There’s more to them than meets the eye. So, in the tradition of these Friday Secret Library columns, let’s probe the words a little more closely.

The Book of Books: The Inherent Strangeness of the Bible

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys Kristin Swenson’s fascinating and accessible introduction to the Bible

In the earliest New Testament writings, the mother of Jesus doesn’t even have a name. Paul says simply that Jesus was born from a woman, and there are very few references to the Virgin Mary in the earliest Gospel. Mark mentions a Mary, and he also mentions the mother of Jesus, but the context is ambiguous: it isn’t clear whether he is even referring to the same person. And in Luke’s Gospel, the adult Jesus effectively rejects his own mother.

Illuminating Histories: The Oxford Illustrated History of the Book

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews James Raven’s erudite and informative history of that ubiquitous invention, the book

In the Exeter Book, one of the jewels in the crown of Anglo-Saxon literature, a riddle appears which begins:

Some enemy deprived me of my life
And took away my worldly strength, then wet me,
Dipped me in water, took me out again,
Set me in sunshine …

The Real Meaning of Hamlet’s ‘There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio’

In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers a famous and much-misunderstood quotation from Shakespeare

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ These words are among the most-quoted in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, and they’re up against a whole host of other now-ubiquitous phrases and snquotations, including ‘hoist with one’s own petard’, ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance’, ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’, and countless others. And this is to say nothing of the short phrases the play has given to the English language, such as ‘something is rotten’, ‘cruel to be kind’, ‘to the manner born’, and so on.