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'Twice a week the winter thorough / Here stood I to keep the goal...'

Five of the Best Poems about Football
Are these the greatest football poems? Literature and football may not seen like natural bedfellows, although it’s worth remembering that Albert Camus, the philosopher and author, was a goalkeeper,…
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Our most recent Secret Library column explores why H. G. Wells's The Time Machine is both an early SF classic and a modern myth.

The Time Machine: Notes Towards an Analysis of Wells’s Novella
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting appeal of H. G. Wells’s first great ‘scientific romance’ In some ways, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895)…
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‘I often passed the village / When going home from school – / And wondered what they did there – / And why it was so still –'

10 of the Best Poems about Villages
The best village poems in English literature Previously, we’ve offered some of the best poems about big cities like London and New York; now, it’s the humble village’s turn. Poets down the ages hav…
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When Dr. Seuss was stuck writing his books, he would go to a secret closet filled with hundreds of hats and wear them till the words came.

Happy #NationalWritingDay!

22 Interesting Facts about Writing
Fun facts from the world of writing Since we launched this blog in 2012, we’ve uncovered all sorts of curious facts about the written word. We’ve also encountered some interesting trivi…
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George Orwell was born Eric Blair on this day in 1903!

Five Fascinating Facts about George Orwell
George Orwell’s short life was a busy one, so we’ve distilled his biography into five striking facts 1. George Orwell coined the phrase ‘Cold War’ – well, sort of. If …
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Happy #SummerSolstice!

10 Classic Summer Poems Everyone Should Read
The best poems about summer ‘In a summer season, when soft was the sun’: so begins one of the great long poems of medieval England, William Langland’s Piers Plowman. But many shorter poems have ref…
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Happy #Bloomsday!

Facts about Bloomsday and Joyce’s Ulysses
Every year, 16 June marks Bloomsday, the day on which fans of James Joyce’s 1922 novel Ulysses celebrate this modernist masterpiece. June 16 was selected for this celebration because it is th…
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H. D.'s remarkable long poem, written during the dark days of the Second World War, gets another look in this week's Secret Library column...

‘The Walls Do Not Fall’: H. D.’s Trilogy, Modernism, and War
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a wide-ranging poem about the Second World War When H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and her then-husband Richard Aldington walked i…
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'The Oxford Book of Local Verses provides a window onto the traditions and customs of British life, from bee-keeping to cow-milking, hop-picking to bell-ringing...'

The Joys of a Regional Poem: The Oxford Book of Local Verses
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads The Oxford Book of Local Verses, chosen by John Holloway In the small seaside town of Bideford in Devon, you can find this …
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What's Byron's best poem?

10 of the Best Lord Byron Poems Everyone Should Read
The best poems by Byron George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) wrote a great deal of poetry before his death, in his mid-thirties, while fighting in Greece. But what are Byron’s best poems? Here we’…
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This week's Secret Library column looks at the words and phrases we owe to famous writers...

The Fascinating World of Authorisms: Words Created by Writers
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Paul Dickson’s Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers All words have to start somewhere, of course. But many of them are of a…
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This week's Secret Library column explores an enduringly popular - and eternally relevant - fable written by a teenager over 200 years ago.

Frankenstein, 200 Years On: Why Mary Shelley’s Novel Remains So Relevant
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revisits Mary Shelley’s misunderstood parable and founding text of science fiction Frankenstein is one of a handful of nineteenth…
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Happy #TowelDay everyone!

Five Fascinating Facts about Douglas Adams
1. One of Douglas Adams’s early jobs was as a bodyguard to a Qatari family of oil tycoons. He also had a job cleaning a chicken-shed at one point. The ‘eureka moment’ for The Hitchhiker…
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'A Haunted House' is a two-page masterpiece.

The Best Virginia Woolf Stories Everyone Should Read
Previously, we’ve picked the best of Virginia Woolf’s novels and non-fiction works, but she was also a fine writer of very short stories. Although Woolf didn’t write a great amount of short fiction…
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born on this day in 1859!

10 of the Best Sherlock Holmes Stories Everyone Should Read
Conan Doyle’s finest Sherlock Holmes stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote 60 Sherlock Holmes cases in all: 56 short stories and four full-length novels. But where is the best place for the reader w…
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This week's Secret Library column is slightly 'against the grain', and rereads an iconic twentieth-century poem in light of current events...

Reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the Age of Brexit
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle rereads T. S. Eliot’s classic poem about a Britain in decline It’s nearly a century since T. S. Eliot, having just turned thirty,…
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Mrs Dalloway was published on this day in 1925!

On Virginia Woolf and Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway was published on this day, 14 May, in 1925. In honour of this, we thought we’d offer a few little facts about this novel, and about Woolf herself. The acti…
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