Hosted by UCC, CELT is Ireland's longest running Humanities Computing project. It has a searchable online textbase consisting of over 15.6 million words, in 1323 contemporary and historical documents from many areas, including literature and the other arts.
It's all very well to get into a thick book with a slow burn, but the best books are the ones that grab you from the very first sentence. Here are MY favourite openers to books...
On December 9, 1602, English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant John Milton, was born. He is best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost, the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.