It’s March already, and I haven’t posted since the end of last year. In the meantime, I’ve published a couple of reviews on Shiny New Books which I’ll link to here. The first was Cynthia Zarin’s little book of, well, essays I suppose one might call them, on aspects of Italy and Italian life. These… Continue reading Marching on
It’s almost 2024, so soon the neat symmetry of my 1973 reminiscences with the current year will be no more. Just time, then, to fit in some memories of the final strand of the first year English programme at Leeds fifty years ago. The A level result that landed me a place at Leeds was… Continue reading Pidgins and Phonetics
I was very engaged by this novel, which uses well-known real historical figures, but then applies a “what if?” scenario to a crucial moment in their lives. James Joyce, when arriving in Trieste in 1904 in search of a job at the Berlitz language school, left Nora Barnacle, with whom he’d left Ireland, to wait… Continue reading Penelope Unbound
Probably the biggest shock to the system back in 1973 was the requirement to study Anglo-Saxon. Most of us had encountered Chaucer, since the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales plus one of the tales was a common package set at A level. I’d read the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and the Knight’s Tale. So we had… Continue reading Hwæt! Anglo-Saxon in 1973
Emmeline, by Charlotte Smith (Walmer Classics, 978-0-6457519-0-1 paperback) A novel with the title Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle, published in 1787, immediately suggests that the narrative will deal with a spirited and noble heroine, whose virtue will be threatened by a villainous admirer. The heroine will have a champion who will rescue her from… Continue reading Review: Emmeline
Back in 1973, the weekly poetry lecture focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth century. For many of us, this was familiar territory, since Helen Gardner’s The Metaphysical Poets was a common set text at A level. I had studied Donne, Marvell, Herbert and others for A level Eng Lit, and felt quite confident about studying… Continue reading Poetry for beginners
Recently, I was corresponding with a friend about doing some guest lectures, and I was asked about what topics I could cover. I said, jokingly, “Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.” I wasn’t claiming expertise over a thousand years of literature, merely a kind of Jack-of-all-trades competence. It stems initially, I think, from teaching A level English… Continue reading Beowulf to Virginia Woolf
I recently had a chat for the International Anthony Burgess Foundations’s podcast series “99 Novels”. Each episode discusses a book that Burgess included in his survey of mid-twentieth century fiction, published as Ninety Nine Novels in 1984. In this episode, the Foundation’s Dr Graham Foster and I discuss Robert Nye’s rumbustious novel Falstaff. We also… Continue reading Robert Nye’s Falstaff
When I started my degree, we weren’t bombarded with information in the way that freshers are now. Our only source of information was the noticeboard in the English department, which in those days was situated in one of the brutalist concrete buildings that had been built when the university expanded in the sixties. We were… Continue reading Eng Lit Life, 1973
It was fifty years ago today… Well, fifty years last week anyway. I was 18 and about to become an undergraduate at Leeds University. I was reminded of the half-century (!) by a friend I met that week, and I thought I’d commemorate the event by writing about life as a student back then. First,… Continue reading It was fifty years ago today