Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
RB lives outside Boston in the United States, PD across the Mersey from Liverpool, England. We have never met in person. We communicated across the distance between America and England via books, via Dickens, trying to use our different lives in the same common purpose: in dialogue with Dickens.
In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and entered the mainstream of American politics, with the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marking the deadliest attack on American Jews.
Brush up on your Shakespeare with our quiz!
In complex ways, social inequalities create the conditions for people to feel that writing anonymously might be useful for them. On top of this, social crises create anxious contexts, when the receipt of a threatening, obscene, or libellous anonymous letter might seem especially hazardous.
When the Venerable Bede (d. 735) looked out from his Tyneside monastery across the North Sea, over the harbour at Jarrow Slake to which ships brought communications, wares, and human traffic from Europe and the Mediterranean—how then did he picture Rome and the papacy, the city and institution he thought so central to English and even world history? His grasp of its visual culture cannot have been great. We know that Bede never saw Rome (in fact, he never saw any city or town). Our usual reference points of its basilicas, shrines, walls and mosaics—indeed, its sheer urban and suburban mass—cannot have meant much to him.
A person who “thinks disobediently” can be invigorating, maddening, or both. The life and writings of Henry David Thoreau have provoked just such mixed reactions over time, scorned by some; cherished by others. What seems bracingly invigorating can also seem an off-putting mannerism.
The first time I visited St Petersburg, nearly thirty years ago, I stayed not far from the area in which Dostoevsky set the action of Crime and Punishment. The tenement blocks were, for the most part, those that Dostoevsky himself would have seen—indeed, one friend lived at Grazhdanskaya 19, a possible location for the coffin-like garret inhabited by Raskolnikov, the novel’s homicidal anti-hero.
From Homer to Euripides, ancient Greek literature has an abundance in poetry, prose and plays – but how well do you think you know these works?
The year 1614 was an eventful one for the London theatre world. Shakespeare’s Globe playhouse, rebuilt after having burned to the ground during an ill-fated performance of Henry VIII, was reopening its doors.
Are you an avid fantasy fiction reader, or are you new to the world of dragons, mythic quests and magical worlds? Either way, test your knowledge of this most varied of genres with our quick fantasy literature quiz!
Ostensibly a tale of the adventures of a soldier, Homer’s ancient Greek epic Odyssey also has at its heart the remarkable story of Odysseus’ waiting wife Penelope, who is renowned for her patience and her fidelity.
Prince Hal addresses Poins in the Boar’s Head Tavern in William Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, exclaiming “Saturn and Venus this year in conjunction!
In the current critical/political atmosphere, the “aesthetic” has come to be regarded as the province of dandies and their descendants, not to do with the enormous difficulties of the here and now.
As Valentine’s Day approaches, we’ve curated a special reading list that considers the complexities of love, society, and human interaction. These recent history titles promise to captivate heart and mind and offer a journey through time that goes beyond roses and chocolates.
‘Ah mon Dieu, tu n’es plus ici. Voila les pleurs qui reccomensent.’ These melancholic words open the first of 173 newly digitalized letters from the ninth volume of Françoise de Graffigny’s complete correspondence.
What did 2023 hold for academic libraries? What progress have we seen in the library sector? What challenges have academic libraries faced?