Nigel Bruce

From Russia with Love

'The Master and Margarita'

Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita is the greatest Russian novel of the 20th century and still so few people know about it. Maybe the Russian movie of 2024 will help reverse that, if it ever gets released here. It was a box office hit in Russia in

How to Look at a Naked Lady

The May Queen

Lady Godiva fits comfortably into the folk traditions of old England, which persist today as local communities revive them. Dating back to Celtic and pre-Christian times, May Day was associated with the end of the winter, the coming of the sun and springtime sexual urges. Some would say the Maypole

Precious Bodily Fluids

The Mignons

Were Italian, Spanish, Gascon and French cultures in the 16th century sophisticated but decadent? That perception certainly arose in Elizabethan England, in the decades before Shakespeare's plays. In France, for example, courtly behavior at the court of Henri III from 1574 until 1589 scandalized the English, with the

Voices and Saints

The Military Genius of Joan of Arc

Ostensibly a peasant girl from the provinces, she demonstrated superb tactical skills in warfare at Orléans and in subsequent skirmishes and she had an intuitive grasp of how to manage the propaganda war, knowing how and when to threaten the English generals with ultimatums and divine retribution, how to make

Poison Pen Letters

'The Murder of Roger Ackroyd'

This bestseller of 1926 ensured that mystery writing and detective fiction would never be the same again. Christie broke the traditional barrier between writer and reader, the “fourth wall,” completely baffling the reader until near the end when Hercule Poirot indicts the storyteller himself. The shock waves were felt far

The Judgment of Paris

The Noctambule

Literally “sleepwalker” or “nightwalker” or perhaps “night crawler” in French – referring to those who like to ramble in the city at night, hence “noctambulism.” The Noctambule is a venerable tradition in French Gothic arts, music and literature that had its heyday back in the 19th century when it referred mainly

Homer's Women

Homer's 'Odyssey'

Although attributed to the poet Homer, who may have lived around 700 B.C.E., the Odyssey was forged into its brilliant form by oral storytellers over many hundreds of years. Then it was written down and reshaped again and again. Set in a time when a pantheon of gods

Alice's Mirrors

'The Origin of the World'

Enter through the narrow gate. The gate that leads to damnation is wide, the road is clear, and many choose to travel it. But how narrow is the gate that leads to life, how rough the road, and how few there are who find it – Matthew 7:13-14. Is there

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

The Pearl of Great Price

The Pearl of Great Price was a popular biblical image in the 19th century - even Melville used it in one of his unpublished poems ("the Little Pearl of Price") - and Hawthorne names Hester's daughter Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. Long before this, the pearl

Homer's Women

'The Penelopiad'

Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca after 19 years. Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad asks: would Penelope want him back? Is marriage an outdated institution, better suited to the days when people died in their 40s and 50s after raising children? With longer life-spans do we become bored with our

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

The Philosopher's Stone

The Philosopher's Stone entered western European alchemy from the Arab and Islamic world, where the Black Stone of Mecca was held sacred. The Philosopher's Stone seems like a secular attempt to find spiritual values in precious stones in much the same way the Church encouraged relics

Precious Bodily Fluids

The Plague

As Romeo discovered in Mantua, Italian cities had sophisticated quarantine systems in place, to keep some people in and others out. Quarantine derives from the Italian "quaranta giorni" (40 days) and the first lazaret (plague hospital) was built in Venice in 1423 on the island known today as

Dreaming of the Virgin Mary

The Planets

The origins and meanings of the symbols for the Sun, Moon and planets are as shrouded in mystery as Venus itself. Certainly the Earth and Sun (and perhaps the Moon) look like shields and Mars is a shield with a spear. Some say Mercury's symbol shows his winged

Loki's Children

'The Poetic Edda'

Should you read The Poetic Edda, the original source for all the great Norse myths, in order to understand them? Not really, other than to satisfy yourself that ancient Norse poetry is three bridges too far: old, foreign and metaphorical. The Poetic Edda (I have the Lee M. Hollander translation)

The Woman in the Bower

'The Princess of Clèves'

La Princesse de Clèves (1678) was published anonymously, but its author is now thought to be Madame de La Fayette, who lived most of her married life in Paris, where she participated in the salons. The novel was very successful and it is still widely taught in French schools, if

Women in Trousers

The Rashōmon Gate

The stone marker shown below is all that remains of the Rashōmon Gate, made famous by Akira Kurosawa’s movie of 1950. How appropriate that Rashōmon or Rajōmon (literally “city walls" + "gate”), which was the great southern gate of the city of Kyoto (then known as Heian-Kyo), is

Women in Trousers

The Real Pope Joan?

There is no really satisfying explanation for how the legend of Pope Joan came into being, which is as it should be. It probably began as a folk tale that somehow got out of hand when the Polish Dominican writer, Martin of Opava (who died in 1278) enhanced the story

From Russia with Love

The Red and the Black

Where does White play on a Red and Black chessboard? At the moment it doesn't. White Russians go into exile in the West. (Blue doesn't either; blue was the color of the Romanovs.) Andrei Tarkovsky directed one of my favorite films, the leisurely 1966 masterpiece Andrei

Beauty & the Beast

The Red Rose

For the Beast the most moving metaphor in the film is the red rose, which he kept within sight, counting the petals as they fell. The rose is a symbol of many things: blood passion, fragility, an hourglass of one’s life and death within the grasp of the bedside.

Spinster

The Rice Portrait of Jane Austen

The Rice portrait of Jane Austen by English society artist Ozias Humphry. This is said to be the only known painting of Austen, dating from around 1788 or 1789 when Austen would have been about 14. It was kept in the family after that and was put up for auction

Life as Opera

The Rise of the 'Femme Fatale'

There was a sense of theatricality about bohemian life in Europe's cities in the late 19th century. At a time when imperialism was revolutionizing the arts, it seemed that writing and composing were not enough—one had to be larger than life to get attention. Lola Montez’s

Splendour in the Grass

The Rise of Vegetarianism as a Class Issue

Shelley and Byron defended and practiced vegetarianism. At the time they were called "Pythagoreans" (the word “vegetarian” appeared in the 1840's). They integrated their vegetarianism into a broader philosophy inherited from the Enlightenment, where eating meat was associated with aristocratic gluttony and consumerism, as well as

From Russia with Love

'The Rite of Spring'

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: Pictures from Pagan Russia Stravinsky's ballet is for cynics. It was designed to shock and awe when it debuted in Paris in 1913 and sure enough there was a riot. Diaghilev was delighted. The ballet itself was premised on a vision

Alice's Mirrors

'The Rokeby Venus'

This Velásquez painting was the victim of a celebrated case of art vandalism in 1914, when suffragette Mary Richardson took a meat cleaver to it. The question is: why this picture when there were others to choose from? The Rokeby Venus, otherwise known as The Toilet of Venus or La

A Tale of Two Women

The Saga of Where to Bury Hernán Cortés

We do not know when or where la Malinche died, but Hernán Cortés died in Spain in 1547. Since then his body has been moved eight times, but it was always his wish that he be buried in "New Spain" in a monastery at Coyoacán in what is