The Culture Enthusiast

If you asked me to recommend a book of poetry, I’d recommend Sonnets from thePortuguese. Many times, poetry can be unintelligible and difficult to tackle – Sonnets from the Portuguese is neither. They are written in a direct way which makes them easy to understand. They are about love, which is relatable.  Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote these poems to her husband, the also poet,...

The Parthenon is a temple inside the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, dedicated to the goddess Athena. It is  considered the most important surviving building of Classical Greece.  I've recently finished reading about it in an art book and was fascinated by these facts: 1) Pericles built the temple with the funds provided by Athen's allies to build a new fleet to fight the Persians. The...

For the love of Thomas Hardy They say script writers should always assume their audiences are twelve year old. That's awful but at least it wouldn't pose too much of a problem for kid movies, right? It actually does. There are not a lot of intelligent kid movies out there. I know a lot of people love Shrek, for example, but I just don’t...

Yesterday's Broke and Bookish Top Tuesday's meme is more than appropriate: Top 10 Authors and Books I'm Thankful for. While compiling this list it occurred to me: wouldn't it be nice to meet these authors one day and thank them in person? But for now, here's my virtual thanks: 5 Books I'm thankful for: 1) Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery I begin with one of my childhood...

The Calumny of Appelles by Botticelli (click on the image to enlarge) A little bit of history Date: 1494 Located in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy In Ancient Greece, there was a famous painter called Apelles. You might never heard of him because none of his paintings or even copies of his paintings survived. Apparently, before he died he was working on a...

That's it, I've had it with lame movies. You know you've reached a cinematic rock bottom when you're watching What Women Want just because, hey, Mel Gibson is in it. So now I'm focusing on classics, because you can't go wrong with them. And one of my favorite classic actors is James Stewart. I discovered he made over 90 movies and I've only...