BOOK BARN

#275: LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION!  Reading around in classical history, you may well have run across references to a particular military troop of the city-state of Thebes, 300 soldiers—more specifically and unusually, 150 pairs of male lovers.  The rationale for this was the notion that no man would want to abandon his lover in the battlefield, or be seen by him in any act of cowardice.  The troop’s existence is attested to in Plutarch, in Xenophon and a few others; further evi

#274: ON THE HAIKU: MATSUO BASHO, R.H. BLYTH, KOBAYASHI ISSA AND RICHARD WRIGHT.  My discovery, made recently reading Judi Dench’s book on Shakespeare, that the “golden lads” and “chimney sweeps” in his elegy “Fear no more” (from Pericles ) were Warwickshire slang for dandelions, in bloom and in seeding, was a lovely reminder that the great poems can be inexhaustible wells, to be read for new discoveries as well as repeated pleasure.  Of all the great Japanese haiku undoubted

#273: DUST.  In 1995, Philip Pullman published Northern Lights , the book known in America as The Golden Compass , the first volume in his now-acclaimed trilogy, His Dark   Materials .  The American title was a bloop: the original title for the trilogy was to be The Golden Compasses , a phrase from Paradise Lost , a reference in the poem to God’s creating a plotted, circular limit to the universe—a theme central to Pullman’s story.  Milton is all over Pullman’s books (Blake t