Lucy Locket lost her pocket”—but the nursery rhyme may have lost its risqué backstory, too. Here’s the real drama behind the ...

Yes, that fictional grande dame of kiddie poems has got a bit of a dark streak, as evidenced by the unexpectedly sinister ...

Rhyme thrives at both poles of literature. It is the material of a greeting card—“Roses are red / Violets are blue / Sugar is sweet / And so are you”—and the high-tragic language of Racine. Rhyme ...

The thing about human beings is that we’re all flawed. No one is perfect, no one is infallible. We are all in this thing called life together not as finished products but as learning, seeking beings ...

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes is famous for saying that life can be “Nasty, brutish, and short.” In other words, life is hard, life is difficult and human beings are born into it only to ...

Chances are that when you were a kid, your parents sang you nursery rhymes to get you to sleep. And if that was the case, it is very likely they sang old nursery rhymes that were passed on from ...