Category Archives: Literature

OK, So Who Did Kill Cock Robin?

Posted on 05/06/2016 by carolinemmurray

A few weeks ago, my friend and (sadly ex-)colleague @elleccollins tweeted a picture of the remarkable Victorian editor, controversialist and Shakespeare scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps thumbing his nose at ‘the idiots who ask me to resume literary studies’. He could … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Bibliography, Biography, History, Literature, Printing and Publishing | Tagged , , , , , , | 5 Comments

O Venusta Sirmio

Posted on 08/05/2016 by carolinemmurray

… as Catullus remarked on returning thankfully from a period of diplomatic activity in the Middle East. (Nothing changes much after more than two millennia, alas.) I’m not sure when it was that airports began to (re)name themselves after people … Continue reading →

Posted in Archaeology, Classics, History, Literature, Natural history | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Plant of the Month: April

Posted on 15/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

As a poet (rather than as an academic), A.E. Housman had the occasional lapse (who does not wince at the immortal lines, ‘The goal stands up, the keeper/Stands up to keep the goal’, in a stanza that Vaughan Williams refused … Continue reading →

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Maria Dundas/Graham/Callcott

Posted on 07/04/2016 by carolinemmurray

Maria Dundas, later Graham, later Callcott, is another of the cohort of women (Fry, Coutts, Nightingale, Marcet, Caroline Herschel …) who give the lie to the nineteenth-century cliché about the angel in the house. Born on 19 July 1785 near … Continue reading →

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‘Hee Gathered Many Notable Things’

Posted on 14/01/2016 by carolinemmurray

I was recently given one of the most infuriating books it has ever been my misfortune to read. Bound in Venice: The Serene Republic and the Dawn of the Book, by Alessandro Marzo Magno, translated from the Italian by Gregory … Continue reading →

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Plant of the Month: December

Posted on 24/12/2015 by carolinemmurray

Completely predictable this month – it’s holly. And it’s just as well I took some local pictures well in advance, not only because the light levels are a bit grim as we crawl from St Lucy’s Day to the Shortest … Continue reading →

Posted in Botany, Gardens, History, Literature, Natural history | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Herod, That Moody King

Posted on 16/12/2015 by carolinemmurray

Last Christmas, the Cambridge Library Collection reissued Songs of the Nativity, Being Christmas Carols, Ancient and Modern, edited by William Henry Husk (1814–87), a solicitor’s clerk and amateur singer who was librarian of the Sacred Harmonic Society in London. (He … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, History, Literature, Music, Printing and Publishing | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

The Naming of Birds

Posted on 30/11/2015 by carolinemmurray

‘Oh look!’ I remarked, ‘There’s a great tit on the fat balls!’ My Canadian visitor sounded taken aback: ‘That’s not the sort of thing you hear every day!’ On the contrary, you hear it quite a lot in my house … Continue reading →

Posted in Literature, Natural history | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Plant of the Month: November

Posted on 27/11/2015 by carolinemmurray

It’s the beech! But why? Surely it’s at its best in spring, when the pale green, downy leaves unfurl from the elegant, tapering buds? At this time of year, buttery Gingko biloba, the exotic Osage orange, or even hazel, with … Continue reading →

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The Deluge of Time

Posted on 06/11/2015 by carolinemmurray

‘Antiquities, or remnants of history, are, as was said, tanquam tabula naufragii: when industrious persons, by an exact and scrupulous diligence and observation, out of monuments, names, words, proverbs, traditions, private records and evidences, fragments of stories, passages of books … Continue reading →

Posted in Bibliography, History, Literature, Printing and Publishing | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments