Products and services
“Your cattle are public enemies now,” a state veterinary scientist tells Homer Bannon, an aging cattle rancher in Larry McMurtry’s 1961 novel Horsemen, Pass By, shortly before he compels Homer to drive his livestock into a large pit to be slaughtered and buried. This haunting scene in the novel (and in its film adaptation, Hud) […]
Read More
On Friday 9 June 1458, a pirate ship swerved and fired on two Bristolian trading boats as they passed the coast of Malta, on their return from the Levant. I found the event transcribed in a legal document. I could see the inky vessels with their lost signatures, the Katherine Sturmy and the Marie, trapped […]
Read More
The law underwent significant developments in eighteenth-century Britain as jurists and legislators adapted older doctrines to fit the needs of an increasingly commercial, industrial, and imperial society. These developments at once shaped and were shaped by the period’s imaginative writing. In an era when disciplinary boundaries had not yet hardened, some men trained for the […]
Read More
When the idea of setting up a Modern Languages school (which was intended to include the study of English) was being debated at the University of Oxford in the late 1880s, E.A. Freeman, Regius Professor of Modern History, witheringly dismissed the study of literature as ‘mere chatter about Shelley’. Freeman was impressed with his coinage, […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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 […]
Read More
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. […]
Read MoreKeep up with the latest from Cambridge University Press on our social media accounts.
