Sublime

The birth of liberty

de su feminidad y de su persona. A la señora Harris le daba la impresión de que, si tenía un vestido tan bonito que costaba cuatrocientas cincuenta libras, no habría nada más sobre la faz de la tierra que pudiese desear.

From the 1550s onwards a steady stream of literature warns of the numerous cons that could be practised upon the unwary. Apparently a small industry making loaded dice existed within the King’s Bench and Marshalsea prisons, but the master of the craft was a man named Bird who lived in Holborn and produced fourteen different types of loaded dice to

In 2019 the Emilia Report (named after England’s first published female poet, Emilia Bassano) analysed coverage of male and female writers and found that women were twice as likely to have their ages referenced – or, in the case of Sally Rooney, her appearance, ‘like a startled deer with sensuous lips’, according to one Swiss critic.

A first thy Poet, never let him lacke A comely cleanly Shirt unto his backe. Cleane Linnen, is my Mistris, and my Theme John Taylor, In Praise of Cleane Linen (1624)

It would probably have surprised both Pliny and Trajan to discover that 2,000 years later the most famous of their exchanges is to do with an apparently insignificant, but awkward and time-consuming, new religious group: the Christians.

What I did

Henry VIII started keeping four professional actors and their boy apprentice as part of his household just as the townsmen’s mystery plays were beginning to fade away under the eye of the Reformed Church.