Tag: Spotlight

Some items in our collections are intriguing because they sit on disciplinary boundaries or ‘blend’ traditionally polarised subjects such as art and science. This photograph represents a combination of the embryonic field of neurology, Shakespeare’s play Macbeth and the practice… Continue reading

The Etymologies of Isidore, bishop of Seville, which he began to write in Latin before 620 AD, is one of the earliest Western encyclopaedias. After Isidore’s death in 636, his student Braulio, bishop of Zaragoza, edited the final text. Based… Continue reading

Marie-Françoise (called Fanny) Dupré de Birkenwald was born in 1780 into an old Alsace family. Her father was a scholar and man of letters, despite having lost the sight of both eyes (one in warfare, the other through natural decay).… Continue reading

The makers of a Georgian universal remedy known as Dr Webster’s Diet Drink or Cerevisia Anglicana (English Beer) were clearly on to a good thing when they inherited the recipe. This ‘medicine’ had been reportedly formulated in 1742 by a… Continue reading

The Norwich artist John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) published numerous etchings of buildings in Norfolk, Yorkshire and also Normandy in France. The Library has a copy of one of his Normandy etchings, showing the chapel of Saint-Julien at Petit-Quevilly near Rouen.… Continue reading

Over the last few days, hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans and Britons around the world have been been paying attention to an event taking place in a suburb of Leeds in Yorkshire. It’s the second Test between Sri Lanka… Continue reading

Two men pose for the camera at a Welsh vicarage garden party on Saturday 25 July 1925. They are performing a charade, but surely few people could guess what their outlandish costumes are supposed to represent. In fact they are… Continue reading

This dramatic portrait, held by the Library, shows Sir John Frederick William Herschel, (1792-1871) esteemed astronomer and mathematician gazing into the distance. Herschel named four of the moons of Uranus (a planet his father William is credited with discovering) and… Continue reading

In 1911 Henry Wellcome was at the height of his powers. Burroughs-Wellcome & Co. was trading at a healthy profit and had overtaken Allen & Hanbury’s to become the UK’s leading pharmaceutical firm, with its manufacturing base at Dartford. The… Continue reading

The Library’s Western MS.275 is a remarkable volume. Produced in Florence, it contains inventories in Italian of the possessions of the hospital of San Giovanni Battista Decollato from 1387 to the mid-fifteenth century. The text is bound in wooden boards… Continue reading