The books of the Pentateuch are the first five books of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
Named from Greek penta (five) and teuchos (book), tradition assigned their authorship to Moses.
Robert Browning (1812-89) and Elizabeth Barrett (1806-61) had to marry secretly because Barrett’s father refused to let his children marry, even though Elizabeth was forty at the time. The secret wedding took place at London’s St. Marylebone Church on September 12, 1846. (Browning was thirty-four.) They lived in Florence for fifteen happy years until her…
The title of Francis Bacon’s 1620 philosophical treatise Novum Organum means literally “new instrument.” It alludes to Aristotle’s treatise on logic and the theory of science, commonly known as the Organon.
The title of Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars refers to the banner of the Irish Citizens Army, of which O’Casey was once a member. The play concerns members of the army before and during the Easter Rising in 1916.
Krook, the junk merchant, spontaneously combusts in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Krook, the junk merchant.
Robert Burns wrote “O, my luve’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June” in “A Red, Red Rose” (1796).
In the 1928 essay “a room of one’s own”, it refers to the space a woman needs to write fiction. Specifically, Woolf says that a woman needs two things to be able to write: “money and a room of her own.” The essay was drawn from two papers Woolf gave at the Arts Society at…