“Here, in a scant piece of earth, lies he whom all the world feared.”
Tomb of Cesare Borgia, Navarrete, Spain.
R.I.P. Anne Boleyn (d. May 19 1536)
When the details of Anne’s life are viewed between the framework of these [her] social and cultural values, the modern conception of her as a femme fatale must be discarded. Establishing a valid explanation of her role at court that takes into consideration the beliefs and fears of the sixteenth-century Christendom and treats them with sensitivity is an useful undertaking, not only because historians owe it to the dead to depict them in a rational manner but also because the events of the Reformation will not be clearly understood until her crucial place in that revolution is sorted out. Retha M. Warnicke, The Rise and Fall of Anne Boleyn (x)
In europe you don’t say ‘i love you’ you just vote for your neighbouring countries in Eurovision I think that’s hauntingly beautiful
UK gives Ireland 12 points, Ireland gives UK at least 6 points. The ultimate story of unrequited love.The UK get their missing 6 points when we get our missing 6 counties.
Men still have trouble recognizing that a woman can be complex, can have ambition, good looks, sexuality, erudition, and common sense. A woman can have all those facets, and yet men, in literature and in drama, seem to need to simplify women, to polarize us as either the whore or the angel.
history meme. five assassinations: Julius Caesar, by Senators of Rome
15 MARCH 44BC. On the Ides of March, Julius Caesar entered the Senate. There he was stabbed to death by around forty senators, members of the ruling class and paragons of education and intellect in the society of Ancient Rome. Only twenty-one names of these conspirators, self-styled as “The Liberators”, survive history and nearly all of them staunchly defended the so-called sancitity of the Republic threatened, allegedly, by the quick rise to tyrannical power of Julius Caesar. However, the death of the “tyrant” had also led to the end of the Republic for which he was killed. Civil war broke out, with Mark Antony on one side and Octavian, Caesar’s legal heir, on the other. Eventually, Mark Antony fled to Egypt, where he would be defeated by Octavian. Octavian became Augustus, the first Emperor and founder of the Roman Empire, and ushered in the era of Pax Romana.
A fuckload of classic literature:
- 1984 by George Orwell
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Aesop’s Fables by Aesop
- Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë
- Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
- Andersen’s Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen
- Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne
- Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Bleak House by Charles Dickens
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- Emma by Jane Austen
- Erewhon by Samuel Butler
- For the Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Grimms Fairy Tales by the brothers Grimm
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
- Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Middlemarch by George Eliot
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
- Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard by Joseph Conrad
- Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham
- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
- Paradise Lost by John Milton
- Persuasion by Jane Austen
- Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
- Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen
- Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
- Swanns Way by Marcel Proust
- Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
- Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Great Gatsby
- The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- The Iliad by Homer
- The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells
- The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
- The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
- The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- The Prince by Nicolo Machiavelli
- The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
- The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Tales of Mother Goose by Charles Perrault
- The Thirty Nine Steps by John Buchan
- The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Duma
- The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
- The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
- Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Utopia by Sir Thomas More
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- Within A Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
- Women In Love by D. H. Lawrence
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Click on the motherfucking Hypelinks bitches.
Here! Have a fuckload of modern literature, too!
- A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
- A Study In Scarlet - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter - Seth Grahame-Smith
- An Abundance of Katherines - John Green
- Artemis Fowl - Eoin Colfer
- Bossypants - Tina Fey
- Breakfast At Tiffany’s - Truman Capote
- Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
- Catcher In The Rye - J.D. Salinger
- Charlie And The Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
- City of Bones - Cassandra Clare
- Clockwork Angel - Cassandra Clare
- Damned - Chuck Palahniuk
- Darkly Dreaming Dexter - Jeff Lindsay
- Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
- Ender’s Game - Orson Scott Card
- Everything Is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
- Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
- Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
- Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
- Go The Fuck To Sleep - Adam Mansbach
- I Am America (And So Can You!) - Stephen Colbert
- I Am Number Four - Pittacus Lore
- Inkheart - Cornelia Funke
- It - Stephen King
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Lolita - Vladmir Nabokov
- Marked - Kristin Cast
- Memoirs Of A Geisha - Arthur Golden
- My Sister’s Keeper - Jodi Picoult
- Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
- One Day - David Nicholls
- Paper Towns - John Green
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightening Thief - Rick Riordan
- Pretty Little Liars - Sara Shepard
- Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
- Snow White And The Huntsman - Lily Blake
- The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
- The Bourne Identity - Robert Ludlum
- The Giver - Lois Lowry
- The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
- The Notebook - Nicholas Sparks
- The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
- The Perks of Being A Wallflower - Stephen Chbosky
- The Princess Diaries - Meg Cabot
- The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien
- The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
- The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- Tuesdays With Morrie - Mitch Albom
- Uglies - Scott Westerfeld
- Vampire Diaries: The Awakening - L.J. Smith
- Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen
- Wicked - Gregory Maguire
Some resources for those writing medieval-type stories:
Interviewer: Nick, what’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened on the set of ‘Parks and Recreation?’
Nick Offerman: Well, everything’s funny. But I recall one situation, not actually on set. We were all at a panel and we were doing a question and answer. And way up in the balcony was this tiny woman. And she was given the microphone and said, “Yes, hello. First of all, I’m a librarian—” and Amy, with literally no fucking pause, goes “YOU GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE RIGHT NOW.” It was pretty awesome.
Greek myrtle wreath, c. 330-250 BC.
In ancient Greece, wreaths made from plants like laurel, ivy, and myrtle were awarded to athletes, soldiers, and royalty. Similar wreaths were designed in gold and silver for the same purposes or for religious functions. This example conveys the language of love.
A plant sacred to the goddess Aphrodite, myrtle was a symbol of love. Greeks wore wreaths made of real myrtle leaves at weddings and banquets, received them as athletic prizes and awards for military victories, and wore them as crowns to show royal status.
By the Hellenistic period (300-30 BC), the wreaths were made of gold foil; too fragile to be worn, they were created primarily to be buried with the dead as symbols of life’s victories. The naturalistic myrtle leaves and blossoms on this wreath were cut from thin sheets of gold, exquisitely finished with stamped and incised details, and then wired onto the stems. Most that survive today were found in graves.
