I WISH YOU TIME

“I don't wish you all sorts of gifts.

I just wish you, what most people don't have:

I wish you the time to be happy and to laugh

and if you use it, you can make something out of it.

I wish you the time for your doings and thinking,

not only for yourself, but also to give away.

I wish you the time - not to hastle and run,

but the time to know how to be contented.

I wish you the time - not to pass just like that.

I wish that some of it may be left for you

as a time to marvel and (as a time) to trust,

instead of just looking at the time on your watch.

I wish you the time to reach for the stars,

and the time to grow, that means to mature.

I wish you the time to hope anew and to love.

There is no sense in putting this time off.

I wish you the time to find yourself,

to see the happiness in each day and each hour.

I wish you the time also to forgive.

I wish you: the time to live.”

Elli Michler  (1921-2014) wrote this beautiful poem in the year 1987.

RUDYARD KIPLING

Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay on 30 December 1865, but educated in England at the United Services College, Westward Ho, Bideford. In 1882 he returned to India, where he worked for Anglo-Indian newspapers,  writing poetry and fiction in his spare time. Books such as Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) gained success in England, and in 1889 Kipling went to live in London. A prolific writer, he achieved fame quickly, he was an immensely popular writer and poet for children and adults. 

He turned down many honours in his lifetime, including a knighthood and the poet laureateship, but in 1907, he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English author to be so honoured. 

Read here.

AMOS OZ

Amos Oz, the renowned Israeli author whose work captured the characters and landscapes of his young nation, and who matured into a leading moral voice and an insistent advocate for peace with the Palestinians, died on Friday. He was 79. Read here.

JANE AUSTEN, GOOD BOOKS AND WISE READERS ...

Read an insightful article about Jane Austen, her characters and good literary habits here.

HAPPY BOXING DAY!

Boxing Day, which always falls on December 26, is observed as an official public holiday in the UK and many European countries. Read here. 

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

"Christmas is joy, religious joy, an inner joy of light and peace." 

Pope Francis

CHRISTMAS GREETINGS

PRACTISING ENGLISH ONLINE

https://www.esolcourses.com/

https://www.britishcouncil.es/en/english/learn-online

https://www.eduinreviewblog.com/

FRANCIS SCOTT FITZGERALD AND THE GREAT GATSBY

Francis Scott Fitzgerald died in Hollywood, California, on 21 December 1940.

He was an American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925). His private life, with his wife, Zelda, in both America and France, became almost as celebrated as his novels.  Read here.
Here you can find an interesting website about the author, his novel and his times.

WILLIAM BLAKE - 5^C LINGUISTICO

William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the key figures of English Romanticism, and a handful of his poems are universally known thanks to their memorable phrases and opening lines. Here you can find ten of his best poem, along with links to each of them.

"One thought fills immensity."
William Blake 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MISS AUSTEN!

Jane Austen was born on 16 December in Steventon, Hampshire, England. While not widely known in her own time, her novels of love among the landed gentry gained popularity after 1869, and her reputation skyrocketed in the 20th century. Her novels, including "Pride and Prejudice" and "Sense and Sensibility", are considered literary classics, bridging the gap between romance and realism.

Here you can read about the Jane Austen Centre in Bath.

“Jane Austen is perhaps the best known and best loved of Bath’s many famous residents. She paid two long visits here towards the end of the eighteenth century and from 1801 to 1806 Bath was her home. Her intimate knowledge of the city is reflected in two of her novels, "Northanger Abbey" and "Persuasion", which are largely set in Bath.

The city remains much as Jane Austen knew it; the streets and buildings recalling the elegant, well-ordered world that she portrays so brilliantly in her novels. Now the pleasure of exploring Jane Austen’s Bath can be enhanced by visiting the Jane Austen Centre. Here, in a Georgian town house in the heart of the city, the visitor can find out more about the importance of Bath in Jane Austen’s life and work.” 

Maggie Lane

PRESENT PERFECT SIMPLE

Here you can find my previous post about Present Perfect Simple.

JANE AUSTEN’S ANNIVERSARY OF HER BIRTH APPROACHES ...

Click here and here to read some articles about Jane Austen's uneventful life and her gorgeous novels which were first brought out in a collected edition in 1833.  They have been in print ever since.

  

SHORT STORIES

“A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.” 

Neil Gaiman

https://shortstoriesshort.com/story/

DECEMBER

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LOUISA MAY ALCOTT!

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, now part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 29, 1832. She was an American novelist best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised in New England by her transcendentalist parents, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Her family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults that focused on spies, revenge, and cross dressers.

Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts, and is loosely based on Louisa May Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today, filmed several times.

She was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She died from a stroke in Boston on March 6, 1888.

Here you can read an interesting article about Little Women, a treasured American classic and peerless coming-of-age story for girls. 

PRACTISING ENGLISH LISTENING SKILLS - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Test your level of English 

Cambridge English: Preliminary  (PET)

Intermediate  B1 listening

Upper IntermediateB2  listening

B2 Listening tests

Cambridge English: First (FCE)

Advanced C1 listening 

OPPOSITE ADJECTIVES - 1^C LINGUISTICO

Here you can find sentences which contain examples of adjectives. They are in pairs that contain adjectives that are opposite to each other.

Here there is a list of opposites of some adjectives for beginners.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Here you can find an interesting Thanksgiving lesson.

SIMPLE PAST TENSE - 1^C LINGUISTICO

LET'S SING TOGETHER! - 1^C LINGUISTICO

REPORTED SPEECH - 3^C LINGUISTICO

Here you can revise reported speech.

JANE AUSTEN - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Here and here you can revise Jane Austen and her  novels which have a unique and subtle charm, with an unprecedented mixture of sharpness, irony, wit and wisdom. 

Here you can find a PDF presentation.

Here you can discover  the Jane Austen Centre in Bath ... I was there last April! Simply spellbinding!

ELIZABETH GASKELL, A VICTORIAN NOVELIST

Elizabeth Gaskell was a Victorian novelist whose masterpieces, “Mary Barton”, which was first published anonymously, and “North and South”, are vivid accounts of poverty in Manchester and reflect her political foresight in the changing Industrial Age. She is much-loved by readers and fans of costume drama, and she is regarded as a daring pioneer, determined to speak out against injustice. 
Unlike the Brontë sisters, Elizabeth Gaskell was fiercely and explicitly concerned with the present and its problems. Her novels sit alongside those by Charles Dickens: works written in the mid-nineteenth-century that portrayed relations between rich and poor in a country transformed by industrialisation. Though this transformation had begun several decades earlier, it attracted renewed attention because of a severe economic depression in the eighteen-forties and a resulting increase in the spread and depth of urban poverty.

She died on 12 November 1865, when she was just 55.

“North and South”

“Mary Barton”

Elizabeth Gaskell & Jane Austen

REMEMBRANCE SUNDAY

On the 11th hour of the 11th day, November 1918, the guns of World War I fell silent and four bloody years of brutal conflict came to an end. Read here.

“When you go home

Tell them of us

and say

For your tomorrow

We gave our today.”

John Maxwell Edmunds

PREPOSITIONS OF TIME AND PLACE - 1^C LINGUISTICO

EDGAR ALLAN POE’S “THE TELL-TALE HEART” - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Obsessed with the vulture-like eye of an old man he otherwise loves and trusts, the narrator smothers the old man, dismembers his body, and conceals the parts under the floorboards of the bedroom. When the police arrive to investigate reports of the old man’s shrieks, the narrator attempts to keep his cool, but hears what he thinks is the beating of the old man’s heart. Panicking, afraid that the police know his secret, he rips up the floorboards and confesses his crime.

Here you can read Edgar Allan Poe's short story.

Here you can find a detailed analysis of this Gothic tale.

NOVEMBER

"When the trees their summer splendor

Change to raiment red and gold,

When the summer moon turns mellow,

And the nights are getting cold;
When the squirrels hide their acorns
And the woodchucks disappear;
Then we know that it is autumn,
Loveliest season of the year."
Carol L. Riser

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Halloween is usually celebrated amongst family, friends and, sometimes, co-workers. However, some areas hold large community events. Parties and other events may be planned on October 31 or in the weekends before and after this date. Read here. 

WALTER SCOTT - 5^C LINGUISTICO

Born in 1771 in Edinburgh, at the age of 1 year,  Walter Scott suffered from polio and lost the use of his right leg. In order to recuperate, his parents sent him to Sandyknowe, his grandfather’s sheep farm in the Borders, where he had an early exposure to Border myths and legends, and began a fascination with the Jacobite cause. After moving between the Borders, Edinburgh and Bath to improve his health, he finally returned to Edinburgh in 1778, where he was educated privately for admission to the High School of Edinburgh, which he entered the following year. At the age of 12, he matriculated at Edinburgh University, and entered his father’s legal practice at 15.

A talented and energetic person, Walter Scott became a lawyer, and pursued this profession all his adult life, in spite of his numerous social commitments and prolific writing. He made his first literary appearance with The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, a collection of ballads, but his first success as an author was in poetry with  The Lady of the Lake. Scott promoted an image of a wild, bloody, romantic, mysterious Scotland, which is still a valid stereotype of the country today. Abandoning poetry, he took to novel writing, and with his anonymous sequence of The Waverley Novels (Waverley, Guy Mannering, Rob Roy, Heart of Midlothian and others), he gained worldwide acclaim. 

He produced a new novel every year, and his appetite for money led him to a misinvestment. His subsequent bankruptcy Walter Scott faced with dignity and an ever increasing literary output. For six years, he wrote to clear his debts, at a terrible price to his health. He suffered a series of strokes, and died in 1832. 

Walter Scott is best remembered for his fiction, but he produced a great amount of poetry, biography, translations, and critical prose as well. 

He is the acknowledged master of the historical novel. 

As a matter of fact, Walter Scott gathered the different strands of contemporary novel-writing techniques into his own hands and connected them to his deep interest in Scottish history and traditions. The technique of the omniscient narrator and the use of regional speech, localised settings, sophisticated character delineation, and romantic themes treated in a realistic manner were all combined by him into a new literary form, the historical novel. He had a huge influence on the Romantic movement worldwide. On the whole, his work is flawed by sentimentality and rhetoric, ponderousness and prolixity,  but his novels command the power to put modern readers in touch with men of the past. ... there are still plenty of reasons to read him! Read here. 

THE ENGLISH ROMANTIC MOVEMENT

Here you can find my previous post about English Romanticism.
Here  you can download a PDF presentation.

"Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart."
William Wordsworth

OCTOBER

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.”
George Eliot

REVISING JONATHAN SWIFT

Born on 30 November 1667, Irish author, clergyman and satirist Jonathan Swift grew up fatherless. Under the care of his uncle, he received a bachelor's degree from Trinity College and then worked as a statesman's assistant. Eventually, he became dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. Most of his writings were published under pseudonyms. He is best remembered for his satirical novel Gulliver's Travels (1726). Read here.

Here you can read some motivational back-to-school quotes to get yourself into high gear for the academic year.

REMEMBERING SEPTEMBER 11, 2001

THE RISE OF THE NOVEL

Here you can find my previous post about the 18th-century novel. 

Read an informative article about the rise of the novel here.

SEPTEMBER

"Departing summer hath assumed
An aspect tenderly illumed,
The gentlest look of spring;
That calls from yonder leafy shade 
Unfaded, yet prepared to fade,
A timely carolling."
William Wordsworth,  September

IMPROVING YOUR ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION

WILLIAM TURNER

Joseph Mallord William Turner, known as J. M. W. Turner and contemporarily as William Turner, was an English Romantic landscape painter whose expressionistic studies of light, colour and atmosphere were unmatched in their range and sublimity. Read here.