quote [ Does a healthy intellectual culture resemble a battlefield or a kitchen? Revisiting Milton?s Areopagitica, a tract often championed by today?s free speech absolutists, Katie Kadue finds a debt to the work of early modern housewives. In their labours to preserve food and transform it into wholesome cuisine, Milton saw an analogue for how the reading public might digest books ? good and bad alike ? into nourishing ideas. ]

quote [ Thousands of free and open audiobooks powered by Microsoft AI ]

quote [ There were two bedrooms. The office shipped across a case of wine for me, and cases of manuscripts, so that I would be able to work. And I moved in. I remember putting Douglas in the smaller of the two bedrooms because I was extremely pissed off. ]

quote [ It was this understanding of the particular challenges faced by children in rural communities that led Bohorquez to leave his job teaching at an elementary school and hit the road, with one of his faithful donkeys, Alfa and Beto. ]

quote [ They won. On Friday, the publishers said through their trade association that they had negotiated a deal with the archive that would remove all their copyright books from the site. ]

quote [ Lucky you ? today we?re signing you up for some sex ed from the Arab world 600 years ago, courtesy of a 15th century sex manual that, despite most of the general population having never heard of it, once attained status similar to that of The Arabian Nights. ]

quote [ Influencing numerous later animal tales told around the world, the 8th-century Arabic fables of Ibn al-Muqaffa??s Kal?lah wa-Dimnah also inspired a rich visual tradition of illustration: jackals on trial, airborne turtles, and unlikely alliances between species. Marina Warner follows these stories as they wander and change across time and place, celebrating their sharp political observation and stimulating mix of humour, earnesty, and melancholy. ]

quote [ Let me tell you that there is nothing more embarrassing than going through your raw manuscript, reaching a sex scene and seeing that the editors ripped the ever-loving piss out of it. Having the anatomical impossibilities of your seemingly mind-blowing smut pointed out is enough to make even the most hardened of hard-core-porn writers cringe. ]

quote [ What I take from this is that it?s harder (as Henry finds it harder in my novel) to talk about what we quite unhelpfully call ?kinks? or ?fetishes? than it is to talk about homosexuality. Homosexuality has a lineage, a cultural and historical tradition, which has always been incredibly helpful when you are making a case for legitimacy. ]

quote [ If you?d never seen a deep-sea anglerfish, would you think it was a friendly fellow Earthling? Or would its grotesque visage, its gaping mouth and the glowing lantern protruding from its forehead, suggest farther-flung origins? ]