D A Burns thinks John Donne ‘the only poet who has written about the flea in an amorous setting … “The Flea” elevates the feeding…
‘Every war is ironic,’ says Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, ‘because every war is worse…
[Previously within this very Notebook: The Bride of Lammermoor (1819); Kenilworth…
[After a bit of a haitus, I’m back to Scott blogging. Previously within this…
At the end of the nineteenth-century E. S. Holden [‘Bright Projections at the Terminator of Mars’, Publications of the…
Scot George Buchanan was one of the most famous poets in sixteenth-century Europe. Shakespeare? Never heard of him. Spenser, Marlowe, Sidney…
After returning from his voyage on HMS Beagle, collecting many specimens and starting to formulate his theory of evolution, Darwin took out…
Thoughts pursuant to reading Gertrude Levy’s Gate of Horn (1948; I read the second edition, 1963 ) — hardly the most up-to-date piece of work, and I’m sure it has been superseded in many ways by more recent scholars. But I found it…