Left: John Milton, author of Paradise Lost; right: a Chinese artefact at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Milton’s writing and the artefacts of the Pitt Rivers Museum are both textual inspirations featured in His Dark Materials, a three volume series by Philip Pullman that is studied in CMS.796. The circular Chinese artefact above closely resembles Pullman’s alethiometer. (Left image taken from Wikipedia. Right image courtesy of Kat Selvocki.)