Tobias Gregory

Acelebrated 17th-century​ poet composes, over many years, his own eccentric version of Christian theology. Along the way he becomes blind, and so dictates the work to scribes, with additions, revisions and recopyings as it proceeds. Before he can publish his treatise the political winds shift, and it is not printed in his lifetime. After the poet’s death an attempt is made to have it...

Imagine​ you could fly, above rooftops and mountaintops, beyond the Earth’s atmosphere, up and out to the planets, to the stars. When we take such flights of the mind today, we do so with imaginations conditioned by the experience of actual flight, direct or vicarious. Even if you’ve never been on a plane, you know that others have. Most of us haven’t been to space, but...

Writers​ imitate their precursors, consciously or not. Nobody starts from scratch. Even the Homeric poems had traditions behind them. To write is to enter a conversation, to make your own reading into a usable past, to choose the literary company you seek to join, or to beat. A writer, Saul Bellow said, is a reader moved to emulation. The question is not whether to imitate, but what to...

Montaigne​ presents an unusual case for a biographer: since his essays are full of personal details, his readers feel that they know him well already. He tells us that he lacks the impulse to cuddle babies, that he can scarcely tell the cabbages from the lettuces in his garden, that he loses and regains his temper quickly, that he enjoys sex only before going to bed and never standing up,...

‘He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love.’ He didn’t mean this as a compliment. When Dr...