Literature

As the erotic novel appears to be experiencing a renaissance Julie Peakman reflects on 18th-century appetites for pornography.

Geoffrey Best reflects on a lifetime collecting books and the difficulties – emotional and financial – of parting with them.

A landmark in folklore was published on December 20th, 1812.

Member of Parliament, friend of Philip Sidney, local historian, and promoter of American colonization, Richard Carew was one of the important provincial figures of his age, as F.E. Halliday here describes.

Bilbo Baggins first strode onto the world stage on September 21st, 1937.

Christopher Winn recalls the death of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and other mysterious drownings.

The romantic ‘braveheart’ image of Scotland’s past lives on. But, as Christopher A. Whatley shows, a more nuanced ‘portrait of the nation’ is emerging, one that explores the political and religious complexities of Jacobitism and its enduring myth-making power.

A classic children's book was born on July 4th, 1862.

The links between Dante's The Divine Comedy and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN are deeper than one might imagine.

Christopher Allmand examines Alain Chartier’s Le Livre des Quatre Dames, a poem written in response to the English victory at Agincourt, and asks what it can tell us about the lives of women during this chapter in the Hundred Years War.