weekly posts on literature, languages, and learning
A while ago I posted a lengthy grammar article about the conditional sentences in English, and in this post we’ll read a poem by Rudyard Kipling that can be used to illustrate conditional clauses. It has some great vocabulary, too. (Not to mention lofty ideas!) Rudyard and John Kipling Titled “If—”, Kipling wrote this poem …
Last time we had a poem by Lord Alfred Tennyson here on the blog, it was his lovely short piece “The Owl”. In this post I’d like to present “Ring Out, Wild Bells”: it’s a classic New Year’s Eve poem, filled with good wishes and hopeful pleas. First published in 1850, it addresses everything from …
Continue reading "A poem for the New Year: “Ring Out, Wild Bells” by Lord Alfred Tennyson"
The Weekend Listener is an eclectic weekly list of noteworthy podcasts and radio recordings, old and new, curated for your listening pleasure. Posts in this series are published on Fridays – please search the website for the previous instalments. LANGUAGE Speaking of Psychology: Why can some people speak dozens of languages? Photo by fauxels on …
Alfred Tennyson was a celebrated 19th century English poet whose life and work largely coincided with the reign of Queen Victoria. He was in many ways the embodiment of the Victorian literary tastes and widely recognised as Britain’s leading poet of the time, not the least through being honoured with the title of the Poet …
Man’s belief in survival of life after death is one of the oldest expressions of religiosity, firmly embedded in the very foundations of organised religion. Right from the prehistoric times humans have been keenly interested in what happens to the soul after the demise of the physical body, as evidenced by the earliest funerary rites. …
Continue reading "Book review: “Calling the Spirits: A History of Seances”"
Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories and novels featuring Sherlock Holmes contain a lot of little details about Victorian society, its culture, available technology and social conventions. As I was re-reading all the canonical stories earlier this year for the umpteenth time, my attention was inadvertently drawn to food, of all things. I found it interesting to …
Continue reading "Eat like Sherlock: food in Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories"
"If any of [my stories] succeed in causing their readers to feel pleasantly uncomfortable when walking along a solitary road at nightfall, or sitting over a dying fire in the small hours, my purpose in writing them will have been attained." Montague Rhodes James was a British writer and scholar. While his academic work in …
Working with students, I’ve realised many of them struggle with tasks connected with art. They are often reluctant to approach the subject because they don’t know much about the history of art, or they feel they lack relevant vocabulary. As they tell me, they wouldn’t know how to describe a painting even if they had …
grammaticus 