Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Imagine having someone miss you, yearn for your presence. They think of you so fondly, find pieces of you hidden in their favourite novels, and tucked away inside the prettiest songs. To them, you are the dark and comforting embrace of a storm, the gentle caress of a dream. A friend, a lover, whomever they may be, they make you understand the word ‘love’.
honestly the fact that I wrote so much about Mary Shelley in my English mock that I got an 8 despite not even finishing my article just sums me up
-Grantaire
Les Miserable (Victor Hugo)
By me <3
here's a proposal, a film about the Romantics starring the cast of 2010s snl.
Kristen Wiig as Mary Shelley, John Mulaney as Percy Shelley, Bill Hader as Lord Byron, Pete Davidson (in a wig) as John Keats (I'd pay to see that tbh) and Vanessa Bayer as Claire Clairmont
bonus points for Nick Kroll as John Polidori and Seth Meyers as Wordsworth
Real talk, as a teacher in England I can confirm that the British government does everything and anything to avoid teaching the true extent of colonial history to English kids.
You ask a modern English teenager about Northern Ireland and they probably can’t tell you about fucking anything currently going on there bar ‘I think we weren’t nice to them’, and that’s the country next fucking door so you know they don’t know shit about India or the Middle East.
The English government PURPOSEFULLY does not teach English children the real in’s and out’s of the British Empire despite a recent call to ‘widen the breadth of our curriculum’ because then where would our football hooligans who defend statues come from?
Have a good conversation with any bald headed English bloke wearing an England football shirt with an EDL tattoo and test his knowledge of the Empire he loves so much. 100 quid he knows fuck all beyond ‘we civilized those people!’
And this is why no one fucking likes us, because there’s no active effort to teach our younger generations why we were wrong or how to make things better, but there’s a clear educational agenda to shield young English children from any extensive criticism of England.
anerican choese
from Mary Shelley’s preface to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein
Pale beneath the blaze Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd Some broad and sunny leaf, and lov'd to see The shadow of the leaf and stem above Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps Those fronting elms
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge (This lime tree bower my prison)