At first glance, this mutant sonnet penned by the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins appears to be a wonderful if slightly perplexing celebration of God and Nature. In the first half hour or so studying this elusive little poem I remained so fixated by the vibrancy and elegance of the imagery I overlooked what actually …
In the introduction to A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway’s grandson records that he wrote “on the principle of the iceberg. For the part that shows there are seven-eighths more underwater”. The story follows Frederic Henry, an American lieutenant serving as an ambulance driver on the Italian front in WWI. He is wounded while eating cheese …
It is an appalling yet all-too-familiar dereliction that I studied various military histories throughout Scottish high school, including the Vietnam War, and yet emerged on the other side utterly oblivious to the magnitude of inhumanity wrought on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during that conflict. The horrors of the Vietnam War represented one of the darkest …
So, The Republic… A thought-train. My favourite aspects of Plato’s writings in this book are his concepts of “philosopher kings” ruling society in an autocracy, and of the tripartite soul. The Platonic Academy in Athens was the first of its kind, and it was just one of Plato’s legacies between 428BC and 347BC. It was …
