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Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake and the Supernatural
I’ve often heard people say that ballet is overrated: dance set to substandard music packed with rather gushy, romantic lightweight boy-meets-girl themes. I would agree that ballet is all about sex (albeit of a highly cultivated nature) but I don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with that. There is also something ethereal about an art form…
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The Fascination of Blake
Since the last meeting I have found that Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell has really stayed with me. And so I was delighted and interested to see a great piece by Philip Pullman in the Christmas edition of The New Statesman with an intensely personal view on how Blake resonates with us all. I’m…
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Introduction to Juvenal
This is an excellent feature on Juvenal which adds a bit more to the Penguin Classics introduction. Check out this link: http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/apr03/juvenal.htm A few gems here including the fact that there is a total vocabulary in all 16 satires of 4,790 words in of which a startling 2,130 are hapax legomena (words that appear only…