AIDS, and other blood diseases like leukemia, provide the sub-text for Anne Rice’s novels about the Vampire Lestat and the popularity of films and TV programs like Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. AIDS and STDs lurk behind every teenage sexual encounter, so it seems. This

That's the original teaser poster above, but others followed...

Burnt Norton (above) is a country house in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Nowadays people like to get married there, but back in the 1930's, T.S. Eliot visited it frequently and the house and its rose garden evoked in him a nostalgia for Britain’s faded splendor and

It was a widespread medieval belief that signs of physical corruption mirrored the state of the soul. Bad people were ugly or sick. That view is still around today. But, following St. Augustine and Aquinas, and their Greek classical sources, it also was argued that all of God's

Kill the Beast: time to sort out the riffraff

Gaston is the true hero of Beauty & the Beast

Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête was released in 1946. Life imitates art. The shooting of the film which started on August 27, 1945 had to be interrupted because Cocteau fell ill, suffering from a variety of skin diseases, including severe impetigo and eczema. He concealed this

Who were the greatest illustrators of children's books during the golden age of the late 19th century/early 20th century? Below is a selection of English illustrators: Walter Crane Arthur Rackham Randolph Caldecot, after whom the Caldecot Medal is named John Tenniel of Alice in Wonderland fame Charles

Beauty and the Beast is a story about love and redemption and fits perfectly into Christian mythology. For agnostics though, in the absence of religious belief, the great metaphors of space and time are all that's left. But that's actually quite a lot really. In the

Who needs women anyway? Below is The Death of Hyacinthos, by French painter Jean Broc in 1801. The god Apollo cradles the dying Hyacinth, who has been struck fatally by the discus at their feet. Apollo had thrown it but it was blown off course by Zephyr, the god of

The Legend of Briar Rose is a series of paintings by Edward Burne-Jones (exhibited in 1890) that evoke the Sleeping Beauty legend. Here are three of the four, showing the briar rose overwhelming everything. The painting above shows Sleeping Beauty herself. The second shows a knight who has fought his

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.