October 26, 2009 – 10:01 am
There’s a nice little piece by John Sutherland in today’s Guardian about that 1929 competition to predict the living novelists who would still be remembered and read in 2029.
I blogged about the competition a couple of weeks ago, having come upon it in the Manchester Guardian archive by chance. (I was looking for references to [...]
September 1, 2009 – 10:23 pm
The First World war Digital Archive has just added a lot of Edmund Blunden material – manuscripts of poems, but also letters, army notebooks and so on.
This is a particularly handy resource, since it brings together material from several sources – Queen’s College Oxford, The Harry Ransom Centre in Texas and the Blunden family archive.
The [...]
August 27, 2009 – 4:47 pm
Two literary newsletters have arrived in the post. Each contains some of my writing, but that’s not the main reason for looking at them.
The Arnold Bennett Society newsletter is full of interesting bits and pieces, but the main reason for looking it out should be a piece called ‘There’s no such place as Wrikton’ by [...]
August 23, 2009 – 5:14 pm
There is an excellent article by Margaret Drabble in this week’s TLS, in which she restates the case for reading Arnold Bennett.
She knows that she is up against Virginia Woolf, who in essays wonderfully convenient for teachers who don’t want to bother their students with too much reading, stigmatised Bennett and Wells as the opposite [...]
I have spent the last few weeks marking AS level scripts for the new AQA English Literature exam, Paper LTA1B, about literature of the First World War. So I thought I’d put a few hints and tips from a marker here, for the benefit of any teachers or students who might happen to find this [...]
At the moment I’m marking A-Level papers on First World War Literature, which is an interesting job. When I’ve finished I’ll write a general piece with some hints and tips for students, and suggestions about how to avoid some common pitfalls.
The process has made me re-read carefully, for the first time in a long while, [...]
Technically I had been to Stoke before. Once back in the sixties, while I was at University in Manchester, I joined a coach trip to see a stirring production of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta at the theatre there. I can still recall images from the play, but remember nothing of the town.
So when I arrived [...]
I’ll be heading north to Stoke tomorrow, for the conference on Arnold Bennett and H.G.Wells, where I’ll be giving a paper about those two unappreciated works, Wells’s Boon and Bennett’s The Roll-Call.
Looking for a picture of Bennett to put on my PowerPoint slide, I came across this drawing by Max Beerbohm. I think Max found [...]
Blogs come and go. Here are some that have come to my attention recently, which others might enjoy:
There are two research blogs associated with the University of Exeter (home of Tim Kendall and his War Poetry blog). Sebastian Field is researching Shakespeare and the Great War, though his blogging thoughts range more widely than that [...]
March 17, 2009 – 11:32 pm
I went to the Birmingham Centre for First World War Studies this evening, to hear Brian Bond give his inaugural lecture. He has just written a book about memoirs of the Great War, and the talk drew on this material, to contrast Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Guy Chapman and Edmund Blunden.
He showed a relish for [...]
