I liked the tales of Arabian Nights from childhood and re-read them many times through my life. What strikes me as odd, is that all the main characters are predominantly Persian. More over Arabs (e.g. a recurring theme is an evil Maghreb mage) are sometimes are cast as evil and unfaithful. If a p...

In Slavery in Massachusetts, Thoreau writes: The events of the past month teach me to distrust Fame. I see that she does not finely discriminate, but coarsely hurrahs. She considers not the simple heroism of an action, but only as it is connected with its apparent consequences. She praises till ...

The Melford Hall manuscript, discovered in 2018 and referred to in this earlier question, contains 145 poems by John Donne among sundry other poems by divers poets such as Thomas Overbury, Francis Beaumont, and Thomas Carew. The manuscript also has six previously unknown and unattributed poems. T...

The Road has been seen by some reviewers and critics as a warning about environmental destruction. The Guardian included it on a list of novels about climate change and environmentalist George Monbiot claimed it was "the most important environmental book ever written". However, the nature of the ...

In chapter 11 of Jane Austen's Emma, I happened to notice that the narrative - not from anybody's specific point of view, but the narrator of the story - switched back and forth between referring to Emma's sister Isabella by her first name and by her husband's name. I've emphasized the relevant p...

In accordance with our meta agreement to have topic challenges and a later meta agreement to have topic challenges lasting for two months and overlapping by one month, it is time to announce the June–July 2023 topic challenge. Based on the number of votes (+4, -0), our 69th topic challenge will b...