James Macpherson

The contents included odes, sonnets (including one sequence from Petrarch and another based on Goethe 's Werther, in which she speaks as the male lover of a woman, with notes relating her poems to...

That is, she took Ossian as a model for a lament for her own chosen ancient hero. The din of war is drowned by one more great and more terrific sound; / A sound high...

AF writes in the style of mid-century poets Gray and especially Collins , whose names she specifically invokes and whose words she echoes, along with classics of the past like Petrarch . She records an...

This novel is well supplied with quotations: Macpherson 's Ossian on the title-page and Robert Blair (The Grave) to open the first volume, with Shakespeare and Milton for the succeeding volumes. It opens...

The title-page quotes Dryden . The story opens in Scotland, twenty miles from Glasgow, with the humble clergyman Dr Woodville giving reluctant permission for his unsophisticated young daughter, Anna, to attend a charity ball...

At three years old ES loved books and at four she could read extremely well. The move to Suffolk brought the Smiths a governess who was only sixteen but whose abilities exceeded her...

As well as a basic school education, the young TC (who had been thought slow as a small child) taught himself an astonishing range of abstruse subjects, mostly historical, by reading in circulating libraries and...