Résultats de "John Arnold" dans Toutes les catégories

There are many stories we can tell about the past, and we are not, perhaps, as free as we might imagine in our choice of which stories to tell or where those stories end. John Arnold's addition to Oxford's popular Very Short Introductions series is a stimulating essay about how people study and understand history.

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” - Flannery O’Connor, A Memoir of Mary Ann

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford upon Avon in late April 1565. He was one of eight children. Little is known about his life, but what is evident is the enormous contribution he has made to world literature. His writing was progressive, magnificent in scope and breathtaking in execution. His plays and sonnets helped enable the English language to speak with a voice unmatched by any other. William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, survived by his wife and two daughters. He was buried two days after his death in the chancel of the Holy Trinity church.

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere. The zenith of Empire is bookended by two catastrophic wars that slaughter vast swathes of humanity. And yet authors manage to record and create fragile libraries of humanity, its talents, its dreams and increasingly its nightmares.