A period of at least three months having passed since I completed Trollope's Later Short Stories, it is interesting to find those which have remained most firmly fixed in my mind. I should say at once that these stories are almost always at the least interesting, but among them are a number of delicious gems, …
Continue reading Trollope’s Later Short Stories – The Lady of Launay
Crabbe: The Critical Heritage (ed: Arthur Pollard 1972) provides the full text of a number of contemporary reviews of The Tales. The following are summaries extracting what I saw as some of the main points of interest. [This entry is far from complete but I thought it would be useful to get something down and, …
'Byron's Religions' was the title of the 2010 one-day Conference of the Newstead Abbey Byron society held at Nottingham University on May 1st. Personally I think that despite some very interesting papers I found this Conference something of a disappointment. Of course this may have much to do with the fact that I was not …
Watching every episode of all 5 series of The Wire was an endeavour quite different to the other viewings of DVD box sets which I undertook during my hiatus in terms of both quantity and, more importantly, quality. It is one of those, relatively rare, items which undoubtedly belongs on both my blogs (which is …
I subscribe to the Byron Journal which is a bi-annual publication of The Byron Society. It is a somewhat strange mixture of extremely academic articles (especially most of the lengthy book review section), reports from various conferences and Byron societies around the world, and articles on various Byron related matters. Although some of the articles, …
Continue reading Byron Journal – Academia and Byron’s Sexuality
(This was actually intended for a March Miscellany but I never got around to writing one) The next Turgenev I read was A Nest of Gentry (1859 - so it actually predated On the Eve). At the core of this book is the doomed love affair between Lavretsky and Liza - an affair which never …
Two more short Turgenev novels, included in one volume, both very good indeed. Rudin is the tale of an idealist young talker who inspires love in the young Natasha, but when it comes to a question of action (eloping with her in the face of her mother's disapproval) fails both Natasha and herself. The intensely moving, …
A substantial change to the way in which my life is organised, and especially the time I have available, took place this month when, to my considerable surprise, I was elected Chairperson of the Birmingham LINk (an organisation which seeks to improve the provision of Health and Social Care in Birmingham). I now have to …
3rd August 2007 Unusually this is a fairly straight reproduction of a list post - in this case to WWTTA on the subject of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage Books 1-3 (Volume 1). I have put it here in addition partly because I have found the book so fascinating and partly because I have tried in this …
7th September 2005 At the ECW list we are reading Bate's biography of John Clare. I was not too sure about the earlier parts of the book, both becuase it seemed to me that Bate was failing to provide an adequate context for the political and literary world which formed the backgorund to Clare's emergence …
Moving Toyshop 