Latest from the Blog
‘I only am escaped alone to tell thee’: Bob Dylan’s Tempest
With Bob Dylan turning 80 last month, when I thought of a song to revisit, my mind went almost immediately to the title track on his penultimate album of original music, Tempest (2012). The song charts the sinking of the Titanic a century earlier in April 1912, and is based on a ballad by The Carter Family…
Give me your arm, Old Toad! Larkin Revisited
“Both conversational and lyrical,” the biographer Claire Tomalin has said. And elsewhere: “he wrote in a tradition that valued formal structure, but his voice is entirely his own…”
Stolen light: some highlights of 2020
Last week, I hoped to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, below the moon at dusk in the south-western sky. Cloud cover prevented this, which seems an appropriate end to a year of frustrated hopes.
Main image: Lewis Chessmen © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.
Blog content: © Benedict Gilbert 2021
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