An account of a couple of days out in April - both during a week of glorious weather. First to Compton Verney which we had been meaning to get to for years. Compton Verney is an Adam House in south-east Warwickshire, near the Oxfordshire. The house itself is a gem as one would expect, or …
Category: books
Fiona McCarthy on Byron
I have just finished Fiona McCarthy's biography Byron Life and Legend (2002). I am not going to write at any great length about this but will say that I found it in general pretty disappointing. McCarthy's particular 'angle' on B. is to stress the homosexual side of his bi-sexuality. Now I have absolutely no doubt …
QDL on DLS
It was at St Hilda's 2007 (see https://movingtoyshop.wordpress.com/2009/02/25/st-hildas-2007/ ) that I heard Jill Paton Walsh discuss Q.D.Leavis's attack on Dorothy L. Sayers and I have been meaning to find the article ever since; finally I got myself into Birmingham Central Library and obtained the relevant volume of Scrutiny - it is Volume 6, Number 3 (December …
The Tenway Junction
I have just finished The Prime Minister, the fifth of Trollope's six Palliser novels or sequence (I have been struggling to catch up with the Trollope-l reading schedule and am now within a few weeks of doing so!). Without going into any lengthy analysis of this great book I did want to just add a …
Winter Diary
Now that I have settled in here and put all the essential posts in the February archive, I will produce something a bit more current. Or catch up with lost months of December and January anyway. Lost of course to Depression. It has been a very bad eight months. Since July only October was wholly …
Byron Conference 2008
In July 2008 I attended the 34th International Byron Conference which was held at St Andrews from the 14th to 18th July. As usual it takes me 6 months to a year to get around to writing anything about it! My only point of comparison for this event was the Exeter Trollope Conference. The Byron …
Trollope Conference 2006
I have decided that although my old blog (http://nickhay.blog-city.com/) will remain in a read-only format I will transfer a few posts here before the end of February. The selection is fairly arbitrary but there aren't many 'amateur' reports on this Conference around! >>Way back in the heatwave of last July (2006) I attended a Conference …
Moving Toyshop 