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In 1885, John Ruskin resigned as Slade Professor of Art to protest the establishment a laboratory for experimental physiology at Oxford University. ‘I cannot lecture in the next room to a shrieking cat’, he announced, ‘nor address myself to the men who have been – there is no word for it.’ The word that Ruskin […]
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The English author John Milton, who never set foot in Ireland, has long been a consequential presence there nonetheless. Since 1890, for example, visitors to the National Library of Ireland in Dublin have entered through a semicircular lobby in which a beatific face of John Milton shone down on them as they arrived. In order […]
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What do you feel when you look at something beautiful? Take this honeysuckle pattern, copied from a Greek vase. As your eyes trace its symmetrical curves, can you feel your “two lungs draw in a long breath”? Do those inhalations give you a “sense of expansion,” or a “vague feeling of harmony”? How about your […]
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The English poet John Keats died in 1821, and almost immediately his friend Joseph Severn began working on the portrait of Keats that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Severn painted from memory, capturing Keats sitting among his books – one of which he is reading – in his home at Hampstead Heath. […]
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What does it mean to write a novel of ideas? These are works of fiction that foreground debate and disputation-like the discussions of Zionism in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, the politico-religious arguments in G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the utopian speculations of H.G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia, the debates about Communism in Doris […]
Read MoreJohn Cleland, best remembered as the author of the erotic novel Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49), was a tricksy and entertaining correspondent. His letters, just published by Cambridge University Press, reveal his attempts to insinuate himself with the rich and powerful at the same time as he teased them for what he perceived to be […]
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Performing Ethics in English Revenge Drama: Wild Play seeks to demonstrate that the overwhelming popularity of revenge drama in the English Renaissance is best understood in the context of the unique ethical effects it generates in its intended audience during a putative performance. Adapting Francis Bacon’s notion of revenge as a ‘kind of wild justice’, […]
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‘Diet’ is derived from the Greek diaita, meaning ‘way of life’, so that what we eat is intimately connected with who we perceive ourselves to be. Historically, those who chose to abstain from the eating of animal flesh were outsiders, frequently viewed with suspicion; today, vegetarianism and veganism are part of identity politics. There is […]
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