Who am I?

I’m George Simmers, just retired from teaching English in comprehensive schools for many years. Not wanting to drift into intellectually mouldiness during my retirement, I decided to do what I should have thirty years ago, and am now enrolled on PhD research at Brookes University in Oxford. My subject is the fiction of the Great War (That’s the fiction they were writing at the time and just after, not modern novels about the war).

This means that I spend a lot of my time reading novels (and memoirs and magazines and comics) of the period 1914-1928, gathering insights into the way that soldiers and ex-soldiers were portrayed. I’m lucky to live near Oxford, and once or twice a week I spend a day in the astonishing Bodleian Library, whose dedicated staff (I think of them as myopic gnomes scurrying through vast dark subterranean book-stacks, just for me) dig out the most astonishing material.  Sometimes I order a book and am presented a cardboard box. I open it to find a ninety-year old book nestling inside, in its pristine dust-jacket. I wonder if I’m the first to open the book since 1915.

So why blog?

Reading this extraordinary material, I find a lot of interesting stuff that won’t find a place in my thesis or anything else that I’m likely to publish or share in other ways. On the off-chance that someone else might be interested in the things that catch my eye, and the ideas that strike me, I thought I’d put some of them online and see what happens.

Where else am I online?

I also edit Snakeskin Poetry Webzine, which I think is the longest-running poetry zine on the web.