Analysis of a Speech by Charles III
The Queen is dead, long live the King! So goes the traditional proclamation following the death of one British monarch and the ascension to the throne of another. This week, for the first time in 70 years, we heard this phrase (which happens to be an epanalepsis) as Charles III became King. The death of Queen […]
Analysis of a Speech by Vladimir Putin
By now, the world is well aware of the horror that Russian President Vladimir Putin has unleashed on Ukraine. A peaceful country that has tried to bridge an uneasy distance between east and west now finds itself under attack from a military giant. In the early hours of 24 February 2022, the Russian President addressed […]
Analysis of a speech by Oprah Winfrey
The 2018 Golden Globe Awards were handed out last night (7 January 2018). There were several highlights and many winners, but the overwhelming consensus is that Oprah Winfrey stole the show. Winfrey, a talk show host, actress and philanthropist was honoured as the first black woman to win the Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement award. She used her […]
It was one of those days
Theresa May had a bad day on stage. “Calamatous!” — “A nightmare!” — “Wretched freakish luck, and agony to behold.” These were just some of the reviews in the press of the British Prime Minister’s 4 October 2017 speech in Manchester. This speech was an important one. With May’s popularity dipping, with the recent setback of the […]
The Gettysburg Address: An Analysis
On 19 November, we commemorate the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in 1863. In one of the first posts on this blog, I compared Lincoln’s two-minute address with the two-hour oration by Edward Everett on the same occasion. Today, people regard the former as one of the most famous speeches in American history; the latter largely forgotten. Indeed, Everett himself […]
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