United Kingdom

To The Globe in 2018 to visit the exhibition and then watch Taming of the Shrew as a groundling. Great fun.

However, my relationship with the Bard's works has always been a complicated one. Over time, I will try to develop some of my thoughts, inspirations and reservations here.

For now, some others' more interesting observations:

• According to Harold Bloom, Shakespeare invented modern humanity. If this seems to go too far, he at least captured human complexity with greater inventive skill than any English writer before him, and possibly after.
  

In the 1840s Henry David Thoreau swapped his busy schedule in Concord, Massachusetts, for a wooden hut he built himself near Walden Pond. We had the privilege to visit Walden in July 2012; it exceeded expectations in its tranquillity and beauty - and the swim in the pond itself was unforgettable.

Writing in the winter of 1843, shortly after Margaret Fuller’s mentorship made him a writer, the twenty-five-year-old Thoreau awakened to a snow-covered wonderland and marvelled at the splendour of a world reborn.

I finished primary school half a century ago on 19th July 1974. My memories of that last day at St Helen's are still vivid (in part) and very positive. I started at Campion on 3rd September 1974.

According to Open Culture, Orwell's Animal Farm was almost never published.  The manuscript barely survived the Nazi bombing of London during World War II, and then initially T.S. Eliot (an important editor at Faber & Faber) and other publishers rejected the book.  It eventually came to see the light of day but, reportedly, Animal Farm still can’t be legally read in China, Burma and North Korea, or across large parts of the Islamic world. However, the Internet Archive offers free access to audio versions of Animal Farm and 1984.

See also:

• George Orwell: A Life in Pictures
• Orwell vs. Kafka

Would you travel across the land, in the hour of the summer solstice? 

- from Ancient Dream, by Aeolian Songspell

The veil is thin now.

A time for the half-remembered inner pagan to re-emerge, dancing widdershins in the pre-dawn dew around the celebrity stones, or the authentic stones, or wherever one finds oneself this solstice-time. 

"Come inside, see my mind...in kaleidoscope" - the governing metaphor of this website owes its origin to the late, great - gone-far-too-soon - Steve Harley.

Saw him in concert many times and in many places and it was always an intimate, unforgettable experience. A top singer, poet and raconteur.

His legacy? Enormous, and perhaps encapsulated in the crowd's reaction to these lines on the double live Face to Face album, a much-played, much-treasured possession of mine since teenagehood:

T.S. Eliot's legacy remains profound and his poetry moves me deeply.

In 2016 I had the privilege of visiting his final resting place, East Coker.

I read or listen to the peerless Little Gidding often, and almost every line entrances, as if peering through a veil at something once known, but half-forgotten because not looked-for.