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George Bernard Shaw and the despots by Stanley Weintraub - TLS

George Bernard Shaw and the despots by Stanley Weintraub - TLS
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How Oscar Wilde Painted Over “Dorian Gray” Oscar Wilde was not a man who lived in fear, but early reviews of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” must have given him pause. The story, telling of a man who never ages while his portrait turns decrepit, appeared in the July, 1890, issue of Lippincott’s, a Philadelphia magazine with English distribution. The Daily Chronicle of London called the tale “unclean,” “poisonous,” and “heavy with the mephitic odours of moral and spiritual putrefaction.” The St. The furor was unsurprising: no work of mainstream English-language fiction had come so close to spelling out homosexual desire. Wilde died in 1900, in a run-down Paris hotel, at the age of forty-six. The Wilde Bookshop closed in 2009, a casualty not only of the decline of the bookselling business but also of the partial triumph of Rodwell’s mission. “To the world I seem, by intention on my part, a dilettante and dandy merely—it is not wise to show one’s heart to the world,” Wilde once wrote.

Kaga-artgallery - Edouard Levé’s ‘Suicide’ and Edouard Levé’s Suicide It would be an interesting experiment to sit someone down in a chair and present them with a copy of Edouard Levé’s Suicide from which front and back covers, promotional blurb, author bio, translator’s afterword and other such paratextual trimmings had all been removed. Such a reader, blinkered against the novel’s context, might well find it a strange and unnerving and hypnotic read, but it would, in an important sense, be a very different experience to the one that awaits every other person who picks up Levé’s final work. Ten days after he submitted the manuscript of Suicide to his editor at the age of 42, the author killed himself. And this fact, which is presented to us on the back cover (and also, naturally enough, in everything that has since been written about the book), isn’t something we can choose not to take with us into the fiction. During his life, Levé was best known in his native France as an artist and conceptual photographer. What became of her?

Arabic calligraphy The Arabic alphabet ARABIC is written from right to left. There are 18 distinct letter shapes, which vary slightly depending on whether they are connected to another letter before or after them. There are no "capital" letters. The full alphabet of 28 letters is created by placing various combinations of dots above or below some of these shapes. (An animated version of the alphabet shows the correct way to move the pen). The three long vowels are included in written words but the three short vowels are normally omitted – though they can be indicated by marks above and below other letters. Although the Arabic alphabet as we know it today appears highly distinctive, it is actually related to the Latin, Greek, Phoenician, Aramaic, Nabatian alphabets. The numerals used in most parts of the world – 1, 2, 3, etc – were originally Arabic, though many Arab countries use Hindi numerals. Decorative writing – calligraphy – is one of the highest art forms of the Arab world. Styles of calligraphy

Emily Dickinson, Erotic Grief Counselor | Book Think Most people know that Emily Dickinson was a great poet, but it takes a deep plunge into her collected poems to realize just how staggeringly great she was. Usually represented in classrooms by a handful of brilliant but overfamiliar lyrics (“ Because I could not stop for Death ,” “ There’s a certain Slant of light ,” etc.), she in fact wrote hundreds of poems of comparable quality, most of them within the span of just three or four years. During the years 1861–64 she produced, on average, a poem every two days, turning out masterpieces the way some people turn out diary entries. This output is as much a neurological mystery as a literary feat, and I think it deserves an anniversary celebration. The English language is such an unwieldy monster that dominating it seems impossible; most great writers are lucky just to tame it for a while. Like Shakespeare, too, she wears a permanent biographical mask. Because misery loves company, Dickinson is the perfect poet to read when you're in pain.

Amazing sculptures that look like they are in motion At first glance these objects look like they are in motion, almost like every object is falling down, especially the “strawberry blanket”. In reality they are actually natural materials, like feathers, fruits and flowers, attached to nylon threads. Sculptor Claire Morgan from Belfast is the creator of this magnificent art work. She has among other things achieved a first class degree in Sculpture from Northumbria University. Since graduating she has pursued a career solely as a visual artist. She has exhibited internationally, with solo shows, residencies and commissions across the UK, as well as group exhibitions in Europe. Other art that can trick your eyes are this tree branch that grows through glass jars.

The Bell Jar at 40 by Emily Gould In March 1970, the poet Ted Hughes found himself in a tricky real estate situation. There was a charming seaside house he wanted to buy, in Devonshire, but the necessary funds weren’t at hand. Of course he could have sold one of his two other homes, but one was the home he had shared with his now deceased ex-wife Sylvia Plath, another was a solid investment, and so on. In the end, he wrote to Sylvia Plath’s mother, Aurelia, asking for her blessing to sell one of his other assets: her daughter’s first and only novel, written a year before her suicide in 1963, for which Hughes suspected there might now be a market in the United States. The Bell Jar had been published in the UK under a pseudonym, to middling reviews, in 1963. It’s always interesting when a very strange book is also an enduringly popular book. As much as it was initially underappreciated by the British press, The Bell Jar was overpraised on its American publication. I accuseTed Hughes Their anger was understandable.

Asterix bij de Bataven (Astérix chez les Bataves) Over Asterix Zo'n 2000 jaar geleden was heel gallië (zo heette Frankrijk toen) bezet door soldaten van Caesar, de Romeinse veldheer. Héél Gallië ? Nee, een kleine nederzetting bleef moedig weerstand bieden aan de overweldigers en maakte het leven van de Romeinen in de omringende legerplaatsen bepaald niet gemakkelijk... Rene Goscinny en Albert Uderzo creëerden in de Franse magazine Pilote in 1959 het wereldberoemde duo Asterix en Obelix. Deze site Via de menukeuze Albums vind je o.a. een overzicht van de Nederlandse uitgaven, beschrijving van de karakters, een toelichting op de in de albums voorkomende karikaturen en een lijst van gebruikte Latijnse citaten plus betekenis. Onder Historie wordt kort het Romeinse bestuur en de Romeinse legioenen beschreven. Nieuwe vertalingen van albums?

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