Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes.  Enjoy!
As cold as …
A cool simile for coldness, since jelly by its nature needs to be kept so. See also a superb maritime simile by Keats to convey the same...
A laughing owl
No idea if owls laugh, but I like this phrase. Next time someone says something too daft to credit, feel free to deploy it.It was enough to make an...
Questions like skewers
A fun way to comment on someone asking a lot of questions, likening them to an attorney sticking interrogative skewers into defendents. 'I'm...
Hangover face
Wonderful way to describe the face of a hungover man, though no doubt he felt every bit as bad as he looked, straining under the weight of a...
Of great men and kindness
An interesting take on greatness as an obstacle to kindness, since kindness requires swerving from your path. Something to think about with our...
First encounter
A first meeting between lovers comes less as an encounter with a stranger than a recognition of someone you've been waiting for. And just as we were...
Parrot-bright shrillness
A lovely mix of visual and aural, with the shrillness of light and colour also evoking a parrot's cry.  We landed in the usual parrot-bright...
As softly as …
What a place, what a time, the two idyllic years Durrell spent in Rhodes after the war. His account is full of lyrical descriptions of scenes and...
Intimations of radiance
Listening time: 3 minutes.An intricate description of the effect an ancient temple can work on the spirit - a falling away of complication and...
Marrow-meltingly sweet
Wish you as many doses of such sweetness as you need. And what a stark contrast to another marrow-related triologism, from Jane Eyre. How sweet it...
Mineral metaphor
Saint-Exupery takes your breath away with the originality of his metaphors. That peace is greater than the sum of its parts is one thing, but to...
The past as precious
The opening lines of a less well known novel, Mary Webb's engaging Precious Bane. Â She opens her foreword with a defence of the mute and invisible...
Appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder. Â
By ‘appreciation’ I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.
Source: Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 5
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