The life and work of Edmund Burke, told through five great pieces of trivia 1. Burke anticipated the Romantic movement. In his A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Burke introduced the concept of the Sublime, which he defined in opposition to the Beautiful. Whereas […]
Fun facts about the life and work of Blaise Pascal, mathematician, philosopher, and writer 1. Pascal’s wager is often proffered as a good rational argument for believing in God – but it has a few major problems. ‘Pascal’s Wager’ stems from Pascal’s interest in probability as well as his philosophical […]
Fun facts about Daniel Defoe, one of Britain’s first novelists 1. He was born Daniel Foe. The French ‘De’ was a later affectation. Daniel Foe was born in around 1660, though the exact date is unknown. He lived through the Great Plague of 1665, an event he would later document […]
The life, work, and death of Joe Orton, told through five interesting facts 1. Joe Orton and his lover Kenneth Halliwell were both sent to prison in 1962 for defacing library books. They served six-month prison sentences in different prisons for vandalising the books. One of Orton’s illustrations (which adorned […]
A summary of ‘Moonrise’, a lesser-known poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘Moonrise’ is subtitled ‘June 19 1876’. It’s not one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s best-known poems, and may have been left in fragment form; alternatively, it can be read as a short complete poem. We’re not sure what Hopkins himself […]