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Gregarious
“But with regard to your Church proper, and the Church-Clothes specially recognized as Church-Clothes, I remark, fearlessly enough, that without such Vestures and sacred Tissues Society has not existed, and will not exist. For if Government is, so to speak,…
William Blake’s printing process
Prosaic
When this Verse was first dictated to me I consider’d a Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton & Shakspeare & all writers of English Blank Verse, derived from the modern bondage of Rhyming; to be a necessary and indispensible…
Quip
The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (1593)
Image Source and License
Orwell and Milton: By the known rules of ancient liberty; Jesuit Relations and The Dawn of Everything
Orwell ends his introduction to Animal Farm, his 1945 novel, with: In our country … it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect: it is to draw attention to that…
Transparent: “Paradise has many gates”
Surely we fear from our Lord a stern, distressful day. Therefore Allah win guard them from the evil of that day and cause them to meet with ease and happiness; And reward them, because they were patient, with garden and…
Acker, Acre, Aker, Akyr… A land, a river, a swamp…
The OED lists two meanings for Acker: Acker, n. 1 Etymology: Origin uncertain; perhaps a variant of eagre n. (although this is first attested later; compare the form agar at that entry). In later use English regional (Yorkshire). †1. A strong or turbulent current in the sea; a flood…
Orwell’s Animal Farm: “a statement about human society everywhere and at all times”?
Orwell’s Animal Farm is commonly read as a critique of Stalinism. However, is it a cautionary tale of how quickly and easily any power structure might turn totalitarian? Does any power structure contain seeds of totalitarianism? Did the animals of…