a very bad winter

An entertaining website of curiosities and mementos involving The Shining can be found here.

Unconventional Director Sets Shakespeare Play In Time, Place Shakespeare Intended

Interesting take on The Merchant of Venice here. Some highlights: "Hiles said he became drawn to the prospect of setting the play in such an unorthodox locale while casually rereading the play early last year. He noticed that Venice was mentioned several times in the text, not only in character dialogue, but also in italics just before the first character speaks. After doing some additional research, Hiles also learned that 16th-century Europe was a troubled and tumultuous region plagued by a great intolerance toward Jews, historical context which could serve as the social backdrop for the play's central conflict."

all of it stage-lit by the harsh orange glare of new street lamps

"So at City Hall, she changed buses and began the long ride out to Ballymacarret. This time, the bus was almost empty as it rushed through the gritty gloom of evening, down grey drab streets, fringed by row upon row of mean little working-class houses, brick red, stone grey, each and every one the same. At each window, between fraying lace curtains, a coloured vase, a set of Union Jacks, or a figurine of a little girl holding her skirts up to wade, sat like little altars, turned towards the street for the edification of the neighbours.
 
She got off at the usual place, a stop near a factory. She walked along a street of tiny houses, tiny gimcrack shops, all of it stage-lit by the harsh orange glare of new street lamps. ..."

- Brian Moore, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 1955. A satisfyingly gloomy book, precisely written and sympathetically rendered.

a few and solid authors

" 'Tis not a melancholy Utinam [Latin for 'would that!'] of my own, but the desires of better heads, that there were a general Synod; not to unite the incompatible difference of religion, but for the benefit of learning, to reduce it as it lay at first, in a few and solid authors; and to condemn to the fire those swarms and millions of Rhapsodies, begotten only to distract and abuse the weaker judgments of Scholars, and to maintain the trade and mystery of Typographers."

- Sir Thomas Browne, 1625, Religio Medici, Book I, XXIV.