THE FRAGILITY OF THE HUMAN HEART: Eugene Onegin in Houston
Eugene Onegin explores the fragility of the human heart and how unspoken words can shape destinies. That description of the famous ballet, set to the music of Tchaikovsky, is by…
IMAGINATION: The Brain’s Meeting Place for Opposites
Image: John Donne (1572-1631) This book on imagination in English literature of the 1500s and early 1600s is edited by professors at two institutions in Canada (their bio data is…
Architectural Images and Early Modern Science
The intersection between architecture and science in the 1500s is one that remains largely unexplored. By looking at the art of Wendel Dietterlin (1550–1599) a whole new approach to the…
An Inclination to Rest in Uncertainty
Even before Shakespeare wrote “hap by hap may” in Taming of the Shrew in 1623, Raphael Holinshed employed the phrase “the hap of things” in his famed 1587 book Chronicles.…
Nothing can be compared to you, Rome
Image: Emperor Maximilian I My headline comes from a poem written in the 12th century, but its opening line does not prepare one for the punchline. The four lines in…
The Rebel Romanov
Placing Julie of Saxe-Coburg in the tangled web of European royalty is actually quite easy: she was the niece of England’s Queen Victoria. And she came very close to being…
A Tapestry of Letters
The appeal and meaning of a tapestry is best appreciated by distancing oneself from it. Especially for large tapestries, one has to stand back 15-20 feet to take it all…
Dazzled by Poetry
A philosopher with a poetic style? That apparently was what the world needed in the early years of the 20th century, as Henri Bergson achieved a level of fame and…
The Conqueror’s Gift
It is typical for an author to summarise the chapters of a book in the Introduction. Sort of like a film teaser, where you get a glimpse of the best…
The Book of Genesis Lay in Ruins
When I first saw the title of this book, Impossible Monsters, I thought it was about members of a certain state legislature whose prime purpose for existence appears to be…