..., the builders of Mycenae were louts, but they had good three-dimensional vision. Polyphemus, the most famous of his homicidal and gloomy race, could deal impressively and destructively with moving objects: ‘Neither reply nor pity came from him, but in one stride he clutched at my companions and caught two...

... is mentioned. A comparison with Koran’s chapter 42 is made. Campbell’s macho attitude to the physical body during the Spanish Civil War is highlighted. ‘Upon a Gloomy Night’ is analysed. It is compared to Imitation of Christ’s spiritual exercises. The phoenix metaphor of the resurrected spirit...

... absurdity as seen in medieval drama, which featured a dramatised allegory of morality, and the works of Laurence Sterne and Jonathan Swift. It describes Sterne's work as ‘nonsense prose’ and reveals that Swift's ‘gloomy world’ in prose and poetry came from medieval forebears, and even had an affinity...

...0 08 10 2009 In 1852, in one of his typically gloomy letters about his duties as Laureate, Tennyson writes: ‘As for myself I am full of trouble and shall be for a long time and by way of helping me out of it the 200,000,000 poets of Great Britain deluge me daily with volumes of poems ...O...

... that a brass band in the north of England copes with adversity and social change. The band in question is a colliery band, and the colliery faces closure. The community in which the band exists hangs in a state of gloomy equivocation. The band’s conductor is sick, and the social coherence which has bound...