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When Raffles Haw comes to sleepy Tamfield, his breathtaking generosity starts turning heads at once, and one belongs to Laura McIntyre.
The first visit of the McIntyres’ new neighbour, free-spending, blue-sky-thinking Raffles Haw, has impressed Laura deeply. He has been upstairs to her brother’s studio and bought two paintings, and even offered to move an unsightly hill for her convenience. Laura’s fiancé Hector, away at sea, is quite forgotten.
Posted January 20 2019
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From the very first lines, Jane Austen’s classic novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pokes affectionate fun at Georgian England.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813) are arguably the best-loved in all English fiction. In the drawing-room of Longbourn, a gentleman’s residence near the Hertfordshire village of Meryton, pretty but empty-headed Mrs Bennet is all of a flutter because there is a new neighbour in Netherfield Park.
Posted January 12 2019
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William Shakespeare recalls how the love of his life once teased him to the brink of despair.
This Sonnet is held to be one of William Shakespeare’s earlier works, owing in part to its relatively simple form. However, keen-eyed observers have noted that the husband of Anne Hathaway seems to have buried some tender-hearted little clues in the closing lines.
Posted January 10 2019
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Literary rumour in the time of Queen Anne said that William Shakespeare owed his extraordinary career to a scurrilous ballad.
The tale of how bad-boy William Shakespeare was chased out of Warwickshire for his scurrilous verses only to find immortality on the London stage is enduringly popular, though modern scholars are sceptical at best. The following account comes from Shakespeare scholar and Poet Laureate Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718).
Posted January 9 2019
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A benevolent lecturer has to persuade a class of restless girls to stay inside on a rainy day.
John Ruskin’s ‘Ethics of the Dust’ is a series of classroom dialogues inspired by the famous art critic’s visits to Winnington Hall, a girls’ school near Northwich in Cheshire, where he taught Scripture, geology and art, and oversaw cricket matches. Pianist Sir Charles Hallé performed for the girls too, and would surely have enjoyed Ruskin’s musical analogy.
Posted January 7 2019
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An Elizabethan mariner reaches Japan under terrible hardships, only to find himself under sentence of death at the hands of his fellow Europeans.
At the end of the sixteenth century, the Dutch were Elizabeth I’s Protestant allies against Europe’s Catholic states and the cruel Inquisition. This made trade with South America and the Far East, where Spanish and Portuguese merchants were already established, a matter of bitter and bloody rivalry.
Posted January 3 2019