Intellect Plus
Art
1,236 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 12 of 21.
- Young Keats, lying on a clifftop, confides his fear of never becoming a poetBefore the odes, before any fame, John Keats wrote a verse letter to his younger brother George admitting to long, dull hours when he felt poetry would never come to him. By the e…
- Dickinson turns a matter of life and death into a sales pitchFloss or rope? Emily Dickinson frames rescue from the abyss as a shop counter choice. The thread is prettier, the rope is ugly but actually holds, and the ground underfoot is ridd…
- Shakespeare's insomnia sonnet: the body rests, the mind goes travellingExhausted from a journey, Shakespeare's speaker finally reaches bed, and that is exactly when the real trip begins. His thoughts set off on a pilgrimage to an absent beloved, hold…
- In Sonnet 28, day and night shake hands to torment a loverDay and night are natural rivals, yet in Sonnet 28 they strike a deal against one miserable man. Daylight wears him out with travel; darkness makes him brood over how far he still…
- Emily Dickinson turned a rose into a bee's lunch and a lessonIn eight short lines, a rose that has gorged on colour becomes a meal for a bee before noon is over. Dickinson then widens the frame: every bright living thing pays the same forfe…
- A trainee surgeon wrote that beauty never passes into nothingnessThe opening of Keats's Endymion makes a bold promise: beauty does not fade, it grows. Sun, moon, sheep under shady trees, daffodils and forest streams all lift the gloom from our …
- Dickinson wrote about a wind that moved nothing at allMost poets prove a wind exists by showing trees bend. Dickinson describes one that rises without stirring a single leaf, blowing somewhere higher than birds fly, and uses it to na…
- Eight lines in which daffodils make a snowbound heart homesickDickinson's tiny spring poem sets blooming daffodils against souls still buried in winter. Outside it is April; inside, she suggests, drifts can pile higher than anything in the f…
- Emily Dickinson grumbled that science had spoiled the starsIn a playful protest poem, Dickinson would rather call Arcturus simply a star. Botanists count stamens, collectors pin butterflies in cabinets, and heaven has been relabelled zeni…
- Keats imagined dead poets living double lives, in heaven and on the pageScribbled on a blank page of an old play, this Keats poem proposes that great writers have two souls. One relaxes in a paradise where roses smell sweeter and nightingales sing phi…
- Shakespeare's winter song says frost bites less than a forgetful friendWind and freezing sky are the villains this song dismisses. The winter wind, Shakespeare argues, is kinder than human ingratitude, and a bitter frost stings less than being forgot…
- Utopia means nowhere, and Thomas More chained its criminals in goldThomas More's 1516 island has no private property, no locks, a six-hour working day and religious tolerance. It also keeps two slaves in every household and uses gold for fetters …
- Tolstoy insisted War and Peace was not a novel at allIts author refused to call it a novel, a poem or a chronicle. War and Peace mixes five aristocratic families with long essays on history, packs in roughly 160 real people, and was…
- Is the housekeeper the real villain of Wuthering Heights?Almost everything we learn about Heathcliff and Catherine comes from Nelly Dean, a servant who talks to a sick tenant. In 1958 the critic James Hafley argued she steers the whole …
- The Prince waited nineteen years for print, yet scandal reached readers firstMachiavelli was drafting a handbook for new rulers in 1513, but it only appeared in print in 1532, five years after he died. By then the manuscript had already stirred controversy…
- Shakespeare turns a lover's body into a painter's studio with glass windowsIn Sonnet 24 the speaker's eye becomes an artist, his heart the canvas and his body the frame. The beloved can only see the finished portrait by looking through the painter himsel…
- Fame wilts like a marigold at dusk, says Sonnet 25; love stays putPrinces' favourites bloom only while the royal sun smiles on them, and a celebrated soldier can lose everything after one defeat. In Sonnet 25 Shakespeare sets public glory agains…
- Why does lovely music sadden this young man? Shakespeare blames his bachelorhoodSonnet 8 opens with a puzzle: a young man who is himself like music listens to music and grows gloomy. Shakespeare's answer is sly. Harmony, he says, is a family portrait in sound…
- Shakespeare tells a bachelor that staying single makes the whole world a widowSonnet 9 imagines a young man refusing marriage so no wife will ever have to mourn him. Shakespeare flips the excuse inside out: die childless, and the entire world becomes the gr…
- Shakespeare's springtime song is full of flowers and one nervous husbandDaisies, violets and silver-white lady-smocks paint the fields, larks wake the ploughmen, and girls lay out their summer linen. Then a single bird ruins the mood. In Shakespeare's…
- Keats envied winter trees because they cannot remember summerA bare tree in a bleak December does not mourn its lost leaves, and a frozen brook does not pine for the summer sun. In his short lyric Stanzas, John Keats calls them lucky. Peopl…
- Emily Dickinson argued that only losers truly understand what winning meansIn twelve short lines, Emily Dickinson makes a startling claim: the people who grasp victory best are the ones who never taste it. Her proof is a battlefield. The triumphant army …
- Young Keats begged Hope to fend off despair, heartbreak and a tyrant's courtIn To Hope, John Keats sits alone by the fire with dark thoughts closing in and calls on Hope as a winged guardian. Across eight stanzas the threats grow from private gloom to los…
- Keats saw sunrise, sunset and the ocean, then said none mattered without GeorgeIn one sonnet John Keats piles up a whole day of marvels: dawn drying the morning's tears, golden evening clouds, the sea with its ships, caves and mysterious voice. Then he write…
- A birthday sonnet for Tom Keats, written by firelight while his brother hunted rhymesCoals crackle in the grate like whispering household gods, one brother reads, and John Keats searches for rhymes. It is Tom's birthday, and the poet asks only for many more quiet …
- Wilfred Owen's mother learned of his death as the Armistice bells rangWilfred Owen died crossing the Sambre–Oise Canal on 4 November 1918, one week almost to the hour before the Armistice. The telegram reached his mother in Shrewsbury while church b…
- Oscar Wilde's only novel was quietly censored before anyone read itBefore The Picture of Dorian Gray reached readers in July 1890, its American editor cut roughly 500 words without telling Oscar Wilde, fearing the homoerotic passages would offend…
- Sonnet 22 argues that swapping hearts makes two lovers the same ageThe speaker of Sonnet 22 refuses to believe his mirror. As long as his beloved stays young, he cannot be old, because the two have exchanged hearts. It is a clever piece of lover'…
- A professional actor admits stage fright in love in Sonnet 23In Sonnet 23 the greatest wordsmith in English confesses that love leaves him tongue-tied. He compares himself to a nervous actor who forgets his lines and to a raging beast weake…
- Sonnet 26 is a love letter written like a vassal's report to his lordSonnet 26 casts the poet as a feudal servant sending a formal embassy to his lord. He insists the message proves loyalty, not talent, and apologises that his words are too threadb…
- Shakespeare hands a young man a mirror and tells him to have childrenSonnet 3 opens with a command: look in the glass. The face staring back, the speaker argues, owes the world a copy. Refuse to father one and you cheat some woman of motherhood, bu…
- In Sonnet 33 a lover's betrayal is as ordinary as a cloudy morningSonnet 33 opens with some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous weather: sunrise gilding mountains, meadows and streams. Then low clouds smother the sun. The speaker's own sun, his belov…
- Sonnet 34: you promised sunshine, so I left my cloak at homeSonnet 34 begins with a grievance anyone caught in a downpour will recognise. A beautiful morning lured the speaker outside without his coat, and then filthy clouds rolled in. Apo…
- Sonnet 35 turns the betrayed lover into his betrayer's defence lawyerRoses have thorns, Sonnet 35 begins, and fountains have mud. The speaker is consoling a friend who has wronged him, piling up excuses from nature. Then he catches himself: by excu…
- In Sonnet 4, beauty is a loan and the handsome bachelor a bad bankerShakespeare's fourth sonnet talks about good looks the way an accountant talks about capital. Nature does not give beauty away, it lends it, and a young man who spends his only on…
- Shakespeare's answer to ageing in Sonnet 5 is a bottle of perfumeTime, in Sonnet 5, is a craftsman who spends years shaping a lovely face and then turns tyrant and wrecks it. Summer is marched into winter. The only thing that escapes is summer'…
- Sonnet 6 does the maths: ten children make you ten times happierBorrowing the language of perfume-making, Sonnet 6 urges the young man to fill some vial with his beauty before winter ruins it. Then it turns to arithmetic and lending. Breeding …
- In Sonnet 7, a single day of sunlight becomes a whole human lifetimeSonnet 7 follows the sun across the sky like a king on procession. At dawn every eye bows to it; at noon mortals still gaze in admiration; by evening, as it staggers downward, the…
- Hobbes named his theory of government after a biblical sea monsterWriting as England tore itself apart in civil war, Thomas Hobbes argued that only a single, undivided sovereign could save people from a life he called nasty, brutish and short. H…
- Middlemarch began life as two separate unfinished stories stitched togetherGeorge Eliot was working on one tale about an ambitious young doctor and another about an idealistic young woman when she merged them. The result, issued in eight instalments acro…
- Moby-Dick hides an encyclopedia of whales inside a revenge storyHerman Melville's 1851 novel is famous for Captain Ahab's hunt for the white whale that took his leg. Less famous is how much of it is not narrative at all: sermons, stage directi…
- Aristotle's ethics survived a century and a half hidden in a cellarAfter Aristotle died, his writings passed from student to student until heirs, fearing a king's book collectors, hid them underground for about 150 years. Among the survivors was …
- John Milton dictated all of Paradise Lost after going blindMilton lost his sight in 1652, yet he produced an epic of more than ten thousand lines by speaking it aloud to helpers and friends. Published in 1667, Paradise Lost retells the fa…
- Descartes wrote his most famous line in French, not Latin, in 1637"I think, therefore I am" first appeared in a short French treatise that was meant as a mere preface. René Descartes published it in Leiden in 1637 to introduce three scientific e…
- The first modern novel was about a man ruined by reading novelsAlonso Quijano, a minor nobleman nearing fifty, read so many tales of chivalry that he put on old armour and rode out as a knight. Miguel de Cervantes published his story in 1605,…
- A copyright mistake helped make Dracula the most portrayed character in fictionBram Stoker filed the United States copyright for Dracula incorrectly, so the Count slipped into the public domain there. Film-makers noticed in the mid-twentieth century, and the…
- Hamlet's story is far older than Shakespeare, perhaps older than Europe itselfShakespeare wrote his longest play between 1599 and 1601, but the prince who pretends to be mad in order to avenge his father was already ancient. Versions of that clever-fool her…
- Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre as Currer Bell and changed the novelIn October 1847 a London firm released a novel billed as an autobiography by an unknown Currer Bell. The real author was Charlotte Brontë, and her orphaned governess narrated her …
- Walt Whitman spent 37 years rewriting one book of poemsWalt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass on July 4, 1855: twelve untitled poems in 95 pages, with no author named on the cover. He then revised and expanded it until his death …
- Shakespeare mocks rival poets who compare their lovers to the sunIn Sonnet 21, Shakespeare takes aim at poets who drag the sun, the moon, jewels and spring flowers into every love poem. His speaker promises something plainer: a beloved as lovel…
- Before Mickey, Walt Disney lost his rabbit and nearly all his animatorsIn February 1928 Walt Disney went to New York to ask for a bigger budget for his hit cartoon Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Instead he learned that Universal owned Oswald and that his d…
- Werner Herzog once cooked and ate his own shoe to settle a betTo goad the documentary maker Errol Morris into finishing a film about pet cemeteries, Werner Herzog vowed to eat his shoe if Morris ever completed it. When Gates of Heaven premie…
- William Wyler got into Hollywood through his mother's cousin, then outdid everyoneIn 1921 a young Alsatian shirt salesman named Willi Wyler was hired by his mother's distant cousin Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures. He crossed to New York in first…
- Wong Kar-wai made his breakthrough film while killing time on a delayed epicStuck on a troubled martial arts epic and waiting two months for sound equipment, a stressed Wong Kar-wai decided to shoot something small to enjoy filmmaking again. He treated it…
- Ozu and his co-writer tracked each script by counting empty sake bottlesYasujirō Ozu and his lifelong writing partner Kogo Noda measured progress on a screenplay not in pages but in bottles of sake emptied. The method produced Tokyo Story, which 358 d…
- Satyajit Ray wrote, scored, cast and edited his debut, then took CannesA Calcutta commercial artist saw Bicycle Thieves in London and went home determined to make films. His first, Pather Panchali, collected eleven international prizes. Satyajit Ray …
- Eisenstein's Soviet masters punished him for the very montage the world admiredBattleship Potemkin made Sergei Eisenstein famous far beyond Moscow in 1925. His obsession with editing, camera angles and crowds thrilled foreign critics, yet at home it drew att…
- Stanley Kubrick's only Oscar was for visual effects, not directingOne of cinema's most revered directors never won an Academy Award for directing. Stanley Kubrick's single Oscar came for the special effects of 2001: A Space Odyssey, whose scient…
- Holocaust survivors in his grandmother's kitchen taught young Spielberg to countIn Cincinnati, Steven Spielberg's grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors, and one of them taught the boy his numbers using the tattoo on his forearm, turning a six into…
- Vittorio De Sica's films forced Hollywood to invent a foreign-language OscarBefore neorealism made him a giant, Vittorio De Sica was a matinee idol and half of a hit comedy double act. Then Shoeshine and Bicycle Thieves won honorary Oscars, helping create…