Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
The Mabinogion is the title given to eleven medieval Welsh prose tales preserved mainly in the White Book of Rhydderch (c.1350) and the Red Book of Hergest (c.1400). They were never conceived as a collection—the title was adopted in the nineteenth century when the tales were first translated into English by Lady Charlotte Guest.
By Matthew Kilburn
It’s not been easy to avoid news that the duke and duchess of Cambridge have had their first child, that the baby is a boy, and that he’s been named George Alexander Louis.
By Francesca Moore
Many of us rely on herbal remedies to maintain our health, from peppermint tea to soothe our stomachs to arnica cream for alleviating bruising. Such is the faith in these remedies that Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) has funded alternative medical treatments and specialist homeopathic hospitals.
Britons know that when the sun shines you need to take advantage of it! With so many fantastic events spanning the summer months, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate the British summertime. Come rain or shine, this Who’s Who quiz for British summer events is sure to keep your summer bright.
Was Henry VIII a “family man” so to speak? The notion seems vaguely ridiculous; by 1547, the philandering English monarch had laid claim to six wives, two of which he had executed, including the infamously-beheaded Anne Boleyn.
By Kenneth R. Johnston
What do Edward Snowden and Samuel Taylor Coleridge have in common? Both were upset by government snooping into private communications on the pretext of national security. Snowden exposed the US National Security Agency’s vast programs of electronic surveillance to the Guardian and the Washington Post, Coleridge belittled the spy system of William Pitt the Younger in his autobiography, Biographia Literaria (1817).
By Trevor Herbert
The story of military music in the long nineteenth century is absent from conventional music histories even though it had a vast influence on most aspects of musical life. Bands of music originated in the British military in the eighteenth century among the aristocratic officer class as a form of entertainment and as a means of enhancing the cultural status of that profession, and they retained this function throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.
When talking about spy fiction, people sometimes confuse verisimilitude and reality. Spy novelists who use the words “friends” and “cousins” to describe our American collaborators are engaging in verbal verisimilitude. When John Le Carré tells us in his latest novel A Delicate Truth that the business of secret intelligence is now being privatized, he’s conveying an important reality.
By Robert Colls
Sorry to bother you with serious thoughts on your birthday George, but you’ve become quite a famous chap down here. To your certain horror you’ve even become slightly fashionable and it’s only a matter of time before some lithe young man calling himself ‘Orwell’ comes sashaying down the catwalk in bags and cords, thin tash and Tin Tin hair.
By Philip Carter
It’s 1 July 1977: the Jacksons are Number 1 in the UK charts; a pint of beer costs 40 pence, milk per pint is 11p; Elvis has just given what will be his final concert; Virginia Wade becomes the last British player to win the women’s singles tennis championship at Wimbledon. – See more at: https://blog.oup.com/?p=45004&preview=true#sthash.r1cxNYqs.dpuf
By Ian Miller
Between 1909 and 1914, imprisoned militant suffragettes undertook hunger strikes across Britain and Ireland. Public distaste for the practice of forcible feeding ultimately led to the passing of the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, or ‘the Cat and Mouse Act’ as it was more commonly known. The 25th of April 2013 marks the 100th anniversary of this Act, passed so that prison medical officers could discharge hunger-striking suffragettes from prisons if they fell ill from hunger.
By Seth Stein LeJacq
These days we generally agree that the big medical problems should be left to the professionals. We don’t see ourselves as the appropriate people and our homes as the appropriate places to deal with major injuries, severe illnesses, chronic conditions, and many other significant medical events. This wasn’t the case in seventeenth-century Britain, where domestic healing was the norm and the home was the central place where healing occurred. People prepared to deal with the very worst illnesses and injuries at home.
By David Roberts
Praised in their day as a complete manual of education, and despised by Samuel Johnson for teaching `the morals of a whore and the manners of a dancing-master’, Lord Chesterfield’s Letters reflect the political craft of a leading statesman and the urbane wit of a man who associated with Pope, Addison, and Swift.
Despite its controversial history, the Book of Common Prayer is an influential religious text and one of the most compelling works of English literature. How has this document retained its relevancy even after numerous revisions? What can it teach us about British history and the English language? We spoke with Brian Cummings, editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of The Book of Common Prayer, about the importance of this text.
By Rebecca Conway
Next week sees the culmination of the 2013 search for Miss England. Aspiring beauty queens from across the nation will compete for the title and the chance to contend for the Miss World crown in front of a global audience of one billion television viewers.
By Elizabeth Crawford
“She paid ‘the price of freedom’. Glad to pay it – glad though it brought her to death (..) the first woman martyr who has gone to death for this cause.” In the context of the women’s suffrage campaign who do you think was the subject of this eulogy? Was it Emily Wilding Davison, the centenary of whose death is being honoured this June?