Posted by: Bremen Leak on June 8, 2018
On the sixth of May 1954, a young medical student toed the line at Iffley Road track in Oxford. Feeling, in his own words, “as if the moment of a lifetime had come,” the Englishman gazed down the long lane of cinder ash and tensed his body like a spring. When the starting gun fired, […]
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Posted by: Bremen Leak on March 28, 2018
The City of Dreaming Spires takes its nickname from a little-known poem by Matthew Arnold. But when it was published in 1865, just one of 240 lines paid tribute to that celebrated skyline. The rest more or less memorialized the town’s incessant wetness—from “an upland dim” where the author walked, chased by “volleying rains and […]
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Posted by: Bremen Leak on December 8, 2017
In Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist, a young shepherd leaves his Andalusian village to seek buried treasure in the shadows of the Egyptian pyramids. And though he has only seen the treasure in a dream, the boy sets off across the desert, aided solely by the strangers in his path: an old king, a humble shopkeeper, […]
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