I am his Highness’ dog at Kew; Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?
How does a figure like Richard III or Macbeth ascend to the throne? Such a disaster, Shakespeare suggested, could not happen without widespread complicity. His plays probe the psychological mechanisms...
For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, one of these curses runs, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all...
Eve is a figure for the soul that each human should love. The commandment to be fruitful and multiply did not originally refer to the flesh but to a spiritual brood of intellectual and immortal joys f...
Against other things it is possible to obtain security, but when it comes to death we human beings all live in an unwalled city
The government-controlled Saudi daily Al-Riyadh published a column declaring that the Jews’ spilling human blood to prepare pastry for their holidays is a well-established fact.
For long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards at least,...
The high price, at a time when life was cheap, suggests both how important and how difficult it was for monasteries to obtain the books that they needed in order to enforce the reading rule.
On the other side of anger at those who either peddled false visions of security or incited irrational fears of death, Lucretius offered a feeling of liberation and the power to stare down what had on...
Falstaff something roughly similar—a gentleman sinking into mire—but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive,...