All About Rock Blog

Some thoughts on Saint Valentine’s Day

Type St. Valentine’s Day into Google and the reader will be immediately be met with a plethora of information surrounding the history and origins of not only the Saint himself, but also how St Valentine’s Day became entrenched in Western culture.

But like anything in the ancient world, the truth behind the celebration is hardly straight forward much less quite as romantic as what most…

William Shakespeare: A Question of Truth

Were the works of Shakespeare his own, or by someone else?

Much has been written over the centuries on William Shakespeare, a man often regarded as the greatest English writer the world has ever known. Yet also much, perhaps if not more has been published on whether Shakespeare was indeed the true author and genius behind many of the finest literary works ever produced, not just during the…

Fred Hoyle: A cosmological maverick

Where intelligence and controversy went hand in hand

Born in Yorkshire on June 24, 1915, when the Great War was raging across the frontiers of France and Europe’s colonies across the globe, Fred Hoyle was the son of a wool merchant, who by the age of ten could easily navigate by the stars. After Grammar school he gained a scholarship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study mathematics, then to…

Sir Issac Newton: A Universal Thinker and Scientist

A reclusive, paranoid genius who became one of the most famous scientists ever

‘If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.’ So Sir Isaac Newton once wrote elegantly of himself when reflecting upon his many achievements.

Like many before him, Newton was passionate about discovering the truth within the natural world around him, poring over the works of…

Leonardo da Vinci: A Genius of Observation

Art, Science and Engineering combined. Renaissance style

Leonardo da Vinci, before he was discovered by Dan Brown, is widely remembered today as a painter, and the one responsible for perhaps the most famous smile of all time, The Mona Lisa, as well as the guy who painted The Last Supper. However he was also a keen scientist, before the word had even been invented.

Not only are his surviving…

Jimi Hendrix: Soundtrack Recordings from the Film Jimi Hendrix

Belated reflection on a musical genius

Released in 1973 to compliment the documentary movie assembled by music producer Joe Boyd, Soundtrack Recordings from the Film Jimi Hendrixwas a 2LP set which Rolling Stone’s James Isaacs described as an example of “Hendrix’s personal degeneration which, needless to say, makes for a rather depressing listening experience,” and “a most ignominious and…

Shelley and the Romantic Imagination

A transient spirit in the atmosphere of literature

As Edmund Blunden wrote in his biography Shelley A Life Story: “Shelley, to English ears the music of the name seems to have been destined long ago for a poet’s possession.”

And who could argue.

There have been many tomes and biographies written over the last two centuries dedicated to one of England’s finest poets, whose impact on the landscape…