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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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The real Henry Higgins
Reading this obituary took me back thirty odd years to a lecture theatre in a brutalist concrete building in Leeds. The first year English students were being lectured about accent and dialect by the great Stanley Ellis. He asked one of our number, picked at random, to say a few words. He’d chosen Bob McNally,…