Welcome to my website. As well as hosting my blog, it’s a home on the Internet for my writing, research, and reading.
I am a retired university lecturer from Manchester, and my main focus is 20th-century and contemporary literature.
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Middling English
The second year course for those of us on Scheme C was quite mainstream, but we still had to tackle the successor to Anglo-Saxon, which was a course in Middle English, excluding Chaucer. Our texts were Medieval English Lyrics by R.T. Davies, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight for poetry; Malory’s Morte d’Arthur…
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Touring through the eighteenth century
Back in the second year at Leeds, we had some choices about which courses we followed on our scheme. I’m not sure if Special Period was a compulsory or an elective, but it’s one I enjoyed immensely. The course was, I think, the only one we did that was defined not by genre or author…
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Substack News
Just a quick post to say that I’m now also on Substack. There, I am writing about Folio Society books. The first post is now up here.
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Fifty Classics
Unaccountably, it’s 2026, and what’s more, it’s February already. This means my plan to track my degree experience fifty years later has gone awry somewhat, as I haven’t finished 1974-75. But I will press on with that, and move on to 75-76 in forthcoming posts. Before that, however, I need to share an announcement about…
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Novel Discoveries
Our novel course in 1974-5 took us from the early seventeenth century to the early nineteenth. Six substantial texts were prescribed, and a good many others recommended. Here’s our reading list from that year. I think I read most of the novels listed here. All of the key texts, of course, and quite a few…
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Scheming through the second year
Blimey, it’s the end of June, so that means that 50 years ago, I was already well into my stint as a general dogsbody at a furniture trade exhibition in a building which would later become the Air and Space Gallery of the Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, and which has just now become…
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Ken Severs
It’s the end of March already, which means that fifty years ago, I was approaching the end of the second term of my second year. I haven’t said much about that yet, but I will shortly. In the meantime, I wanted to say a little about Ken Severs, about whom I wrote previously here. Since…
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Cinema Muto at Pordenone
To Pordenone, a lovely town in the north-east region of Friuli Venezia Giulia for the 43rd edition of the Giornate del Cinema Muto, the annual festival of silent film. We had dipped a toe in the event two years ago, and enjoyed it so much that we decided to register for the whole week this…
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Home thoughts from abroad
I am currently in Italy, which is one reason why the reminiscences of undergraduate life in the seventies have been on hold. I’ll get back to that topic when I’m back in the UK, starting with a post on Ken Severs, about whom I wrote last year. I had a fascinating conversation with his son,…
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Assessment, 1973 style
I became a lecturer in higher education quite late in life – I was 38, and had a career as a secondary school teacher behind me. At that point, in the early nineties, many universities were moving into what was called modularisation. The elements of degrees, often called courses hitherto, were being replaced by a…
Thanks! Quite daunting, but something that will give great pleasure, I think.