Search Results

We cannot possibly know for certain what happened between two people several hundred years ago, especially when surviving testimony has been coloured with such fevered speculation as surrounds the wit …

Not long into The Chimes: A Goblin Story, one of Dickens' lesser-known Christmas stories, there's this paragraph about bells: They were old Chimes, trust me. Centuries ago, these Bells had been bapti …

If you read around the works of Nabokov, it's quite common to find people stating as a fact that he was abused as a child by his uncle and that the family were aware and covered it up. I found one com …

Arnold Wesker's play Chips with Everything is an examination of class attitudes in Britain through the window of the armed forces. In one scene a group of conscripts sing the peculiar English folk so …

Approximately 100,000,000 roubles. This is not a straightfoward conversion due to fluctuations in the value of the rouble after the collapse of communism. This historical currency converter runs up to …

TLDR: 1 - Marlow was not an atheist in the modern sense. 2- Dr Faustus is not as clearly religious as it first appears Let's start by pointing out that "atheism" doesn't necessarily stop an author fro …

Sarah Waters' award-winning Victorian crime novel Fingersmith makes liberal use of period underworld slang. Indeed the title is such slang for a petty thief. Most of it is unfamiliar to the modern rea …

Bethan Roberts is British, and My Policeman is set in Britain. In British schools, it's still the norm today to refer to all female teachers as "Miss" regardless of their marital status. As user @Gare …

Major spoilers for The Mezzotint by M. R. James, from his 1904 collection Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, follow. At two points in the story, witnesses observe a figure in the titular engraving. Its dr …

The public saw the plays were fiction, perhaps even a warning against witchcraft, and the magic in them is divorced of religious overtones. It is noteworthy that the two Shakespeare plays which deal …

While it's hard to prove a negative, it is extremely unlikely that Nabokov based this passage on any kind of real-world or second-hand knowledge. As the essay The Long 1950s in the collection Vladimir …

It seems unlikely that the quoted couplet is a Biblical reference, for the simple reason that there are no other Biblical allusions in the poem. Rather, its focus is on class differentials and the imp …