This anonymous lyric describes the coming of spring: the birds singing, flowers blooming, randy (male) poets complaining that they’re not getting any action. Wikipedia thinks it ‘possibly the most famous of the Middle English lyrics’ and ‘one of the best lyrics in the language.’ I’ve had a go at sliding…

Edna Frances Heidbreder (1890-1985) was an American psychologist who researched psychometrics, systematic psychology, and concept formation, and who also developed a theory of history. She took a Masters in philosophy at the University of Wisconsin in 1918, and afterwards did a PhD in Psychology at Columbia University in New York…

In Perelandra (1943), the second volume of C S Lewis’s ‘Space Trilogy’, there’s a scene that has never landed for me, never quite worked. Perelandra is Lewis’s SFnal retelling of the Eden story. On planet Venus (the native name for which is the novel’s title) an alien Adam and an…

In the late fourth-century BC, Athens had fallen in power from her former glory-days and was under the control of Macedonia. When Alexander the Great died in 323 BC rule passed to two of his generals, Antipater and Craterus. Craterus died in 320, leaving Antipater in sole charge, but only…

‘Cleon’ was first published in Men and Women (1855): a lengthy dramatic monologue put into the mouth of a fictional Greek poet from the first century AD. In the poem he is writing a letter, replying to an epistle he has just received (along with various gifts) from another fictional…

One of Horace’s most famous odes, this. In this post, after the Latin, there are three versions: literal prose; an attempt by me to render the poem in terms of its dactylic rhythm, line by line; and A E Housman’s famous Englishing. First: Diffugere nives, redeunt iam gramina campis arboribusque comae; mutat…

A E Housman spent much time and labour editing Manilius, and nobody knows why. Marcus Manilius was a 1st century AD astrologer and very minor poet, author of a five book mini-epic called Astronomicon which is very dull. It’s not that he is entirely devoid of interest to the modern…

So here’s a remarkable thing. Mars has two moons. That’s not the remarkable thing (although, you know: I suppose in a sense it is) — though these moons, Phobos and Deimos, were not discovered until 1877: Asaph Hall discovered Deimos on 12 August 1877 at about 07:48 UTC and Phobos…

No-one knows where the name Voltaire came from. The man himself was born François-Marie Arouet. He was known in his family, when a boy, as ‘Zozo’, and late in 1718, after the start of his literary fame (he had been writing since a teenager, but his breakthrough was the staging…