During the Paris pandemic confinement period of 2020, the dread of viral death was in the air. Confined to the indoors, I took the hint and finished in May my second (and, I think, last) book of drôle poetry called Styling Sagaciousness: Oh Great No! Drollness being essential to a good life, I fashioned Styling Sa-gaciousness as a death farce epic poem divided into seve…
‘A useful godsend are you to me now,’ are the trickster god’s first words to the tortoise in Shelley’s translation,2 and the Homeric shell is clearly a useful godsend for Shelley as well: as Gary Farnell has argued, the pun on ?????/Shelley enables the poet to claim the allegorical account of the origins of lyric poetry ‘as emblem of his own general …
William Sharp was born on September 12, 1855, at 4 Garthland Place in Paisley, Scotland. He was the oldest in a family of five daughters and three sons. His father, David Galbreath Sharp, was a partner in a mercantile house, and his mother, Katherine Brooks, was the daughter of the Swedish Vice Consul in Glasgow. Sharp spent the summers of his chi…
Wrapped in modernist architect Marcel Breuer’s 1971 addition to the Cleveland Museum of Art, A Treatise on the Marvelous for Prestigious Museums considers the global ecological catastrophe by way of a speculative address to the art museums of the future, revisiting mid-century modes of site-specificity and speculative collage as utopian practices for the present. Written over the course of a …
This glorious new Kindle in Motion edition of Newt Scamander's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (considered a classic throughout the wizarding world) features an extraordinary array of magical creatures, from Acromantula to Yeti via ten different breeds of dragon – all beautifully illustrated in full colour in a beautifully designed digital reading experience by the brilliantly inventi…
J.K. Rowling’s five-film Fantastic Beasts adventure series continues with the original screenplay for Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald At the end of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, the powerful Dark wizard Gellert Grindelwald was captured in New York with the help of Newt Scamander. But, making good on his threat, Grindelwald escapes custody and sets about gathering follo…
But Captain Howard Stansbury, who knew better, watched the distant Wasatch pass as he piloted, serpentine, his ship counter-clockwise around the lake, at ease in his prime, his personal timepiece stashed to a satchel, the company’s chronometers safely placed in their soft-cushioned, velvet-lined case, prepared for the purpose, and always strapped, on the trail, with care in…
Lynda Mugglestone's hugely popular The Oxford History of English is now updated and entirely reset in a new edition featuring David Crystal's new take on the future of English in the wider world. In accounts made vivid with examples from a vast range of documentary evidence that includes letters, diaries, and private records, fifteen scholars trace the history of English from its ancient Ind…
Eleven years ago, one was discovered in my school. A kindergarten student, on her first day. She was devoured almost immediately. What was she thinking? Maybe the sudden (and it’s always sudden) loneliness at home drove her to school under some misbegotten idea that she’d fi nd companionship. The teacher announced nap time, and the little tyke was left standing alone on the fl oor clutching…
Mr Tench went out to look for his ether cylinder, into the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust. A few vultures looked down from the roof with shabby indifference: he wasn’t carrion yet. A faint feeling of rebellion stirred in Mr Tench’s heart, and he wrenched up a piece of the road with splintering finger-nails and tossed it feebly towards them. One rose and flapped across the town: …