are nothing like, just weather of a sort, discarnate, eyeless, waiting for a sign: a run of matter blackening the floor, the ache of rennet, hoofprints in the stone.

Sir Peter Russell (1913–2006) was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1981. He was also Director of Portuguese Studies, and the author of a ...

Australia has often been called a “new country,” but its poetry has seldom been thought of in these terms. Les Murray (1938–2019), still the country’s best-known poet, memorably styled himself as a ...

Early in Josephine Tey’s classic mystery The Daughter of Time (1951), Inspector Grant, laid up with a broken leg and vainly seeking distraction with a heap of the latest bestsellers, remarks ...

“If you see me on the scaffolding of a house under construction … I’m Mario Fagiolo. If, instead, you see me belly up in the field, tickling the clouds with a blade of grass between my teeth, make no ...

An ardent promulgator of laissez-faire capitalism, Ayn Rand hated altruism and “denounced the profession of social workers”. In Ayn Rand: Writing a gospel of success, Alexandra Popoff describes Rand’s ...

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.480–524 CE), statesman, philosopher and scholar whose aim was to translate the entire works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, was a prominent figure in late ...

One notable simile in Antony and Cleopatra is uttered by a character of Shakespeare’s own invention, Scarus, according to whom Antony absents himself from the Battle of Actium “like a doting mallard”.

On the one hand, there is Ion of Chios – not to mention Lamprocles, Odysseus and Phemios the poet. And on the inevitable other hand? Well, there is the town of Ballynahinch and the tricky road to ...

For some people, writing in a language other than their mother tongue presents an obvious advantage. No longer constrained by their usual grammatical and lexical norms, they unconsciously import turns ...

One of my gigs here in Washington DC was, just a few days ago, at the Kennedy Center (a cultural centre launched by President Eisenhower, supported by JFK and eventually becoming a memorial to him).