Quintessential quince

Over an old garden wall in Midhurst, Sussex, used to trail the branches of a quince tree, whose crop seemed to embody Keats’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”. Boys were often tempted to steal a fruit that no one appeared to want, ignorant of how to transform sour inedibility into a food fit for the gods.

“Now, Voyager, sail thou forth”

Science writing – health, climate change, environment, nanotechnology, biotechnology – often gets a poor press. Too technical, too obscure, too fantastic. A joy, therefore, to find a brilliant article in the latest issue of The Smithsonian on the exploration of outer space.

Tenochtitlán: City of the Aztecs

The city-state of Tenochtitlán was situated on an island in Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. Founded in 1325, it became the capital of the Aztec Empire in the 15th century, until destroyed by Hernán Cortés in an act of ideological and cultural vandalism.

Anthony Trollope’s reverend gentlemen

The clergy in Victorian novels are often the butt of derision, their foibles highlighted over their virtues. Anthony Trollope offers a more nuanced portrait and his Barsetshire Chronicles are as wonderful and insightful today as when they first appeared 150 years ago.

Gloriana: requiescat in pace

Gloriana was the name given by the 16th century English poet Edmund Spenser to the character of Queen Elizabeth I in his poem The Faerie Queene. It is also the title of Benjamin Britten’s opera, based on Lytton Strachey’s book Elizabeth and Essex: A Tragic History.

RMS Titanic

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Convergence of the Twain” is an unusual perspective on the loss of RMS Titanic on 15 April 1912. The first five stanzas of the poem concern the submerged ship itself, while the last six discuss its fate while afloat.