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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...