| First quiet attraction. A sense that behind a carefully composed front are wild universes of thought and emotion and strangeness. A light relationship begins, you open up to each other. Discover things you didn’t know you didn’t know. Days gain colour. Everywhere significance. You’re enraptured. Plunging. Hearts gorge. A lifelong romance begins. Ah, libraries. What will survive of us are books. Anyway, it’s February and Valentine’s Day and the marketing communications law is we have to talk about love. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Remembrance
Raved about by critics and attracting over 90,000 visitors, our Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition is now in its final few weeks. It’ll never happen again. It’s closing on 19 February. Don’t let it be the one that got away. Bring a lover or two. They’ll be impressed by your intelligence, dazzled by room after room of gold, and turned on by music, poetry and huge manuscripts. |
|
|
|
|
|
Wondrous moment
Bring your kittens (your children, not actual kittens, security would have, well, kittens) to Cats on the Page at half term. We’ve got books and pictures galore about literary cats, a cosy reading corner and curious cat noises. |
|
|
|
|
|
| Discover how sex, sexuality, love and justice related to the Women’s Liberation Movement. |
|
|
|
| St Valentine was a decapitated martyr and then Geoffrey Chaucer turned him into a symbol of romance. |
|
|
|
|
| Here’s a 1748 map that guides one past the islands of Lust and Money, through the Whirlpool of Beauty, between the Capes of Repentance and Extasy, avoiding Cuckold Bay and the Rocks of Jealousy, and into the safe Harbour of Marriage. |
|
|
|
| English folklore tells us that if a man gives a woman a ring that has lain in a swallow’s nest for nine days she would surely be his love. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I wanna be yours
Hanif Kureishi's 1985 film My Beautiful Laundrettewas a radical departure from previous representations of British Asians. Two young men, once schoolfriends, one white, one Asian, embark on a romantic relationship whilst running a laundrette. Follow the link to see original scripts and production photographs. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Never give all the heart
Intended as templates for courtship, The New Lover’s Instructor from around 1780 contains a collection of fictional letters, compliment cards and dialogues. A prize to the first British Library marriage that occurs as a result of following this guide... |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Bright Star
The moderator for Inspiring Entrepreneurs: Digital Disruptors on Monday 11 February, is our Business & IP ambassador Anne-Marie Imafidon. She holds the current world record for the youngest girl ever to pass A-level computing aged 11, and is one of the youngest people to be awarded a Master's Degree in Mathematics by the University of Oxford aged 20. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
