Bruce Kinzer: ‘By 1894, when Leslie Stephen came to write his brother’s biography, the swelling tide of specialization had eroded the integrated public culture of mid-Victorian England. A cluster of forces propelled this tide. The growing prestige of natural science enabled its practitioners to enhance their professional status and enshrine the scientific method as basic to the pursuit of knowledge.’

Peter McCarey; ‘Souls do go astray in the process; the protagonist of The Sheltering Sky will never find home. But that is because nothing in this world or what she knows of the next merits the name. The whole story illustrates what Simone Weil, around the same time, was trying to combat in writing L’Enracinement.’

Caroline Warman: ‘In sum, the “Éléments de physiologie” is overtly atheist and materialist. Materialism refers to the view that the universe and everything in it is made entirely from matter in different shapes and forms; in this eighteenth-century context, it is also automatically understood to be an atheist position, and therefore dangerous, both for the person who holds it and might be imprisoned because of it…’

Michail Farmer: ‘Because literary elegance is so connected with the experience of the reader, it is also finely tuned to the demands of the moment, and in this sense it is closely associated with manners, which, as Emily Post puts it, “are a sensitive awareness of the feelings of others.” Elegance assumes the intelligence and good will of the reader and strives to meet them with the same qualities.’

Richard Barengarten; ‘In terms of heritage, tangible and intangible, the protective and projective celebration of poetry in the present is action for and on behalf of the future. Past, present and future are treasured together in the Medellin Poetry Festival.’