Links

Two new blogs: Nick Milne’s very promising new blog is called Wellington House, since his current research is on the writers recruited by that Buckingham Gate organisation to write pieces that could be used for propaganda purposes. The blog ranges wider than that, though. The Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship blog is run by Deb Fisher, who […]

‘Legacies of War’ at Leeds

I went to Leeds University yesterday to listen to Adrian Gregory talking about the War and religion  ( I knew he’d be good, because I heard him a few years ago at Birmingham). I’d expected an analysis of religion in England, developing the account in his book The Last Great War (strongly recommended); instead he […]

A new blog, and Leeds seminars

Well, it’s been going for a couple of months, but it’s new to me. armsand themedicalman is a blog by Jessica Meyer (whose Men of War was welcomed enthusiastically in this blog a few years ago). The blog will be a by-product of Jessica’s current research, into the experiences and identities of men serving in […]

Reading 1900-1950

Sheffield Hallam University has established a reputation as  a centre for the study of popular fiction; the English Department there runs a reading group devoted to the  fiction of the first half of the twentieth century.  They have fairly recently started a blog, with reports on  books they have looked at, some of which are […]

Wodehouse and the Marginalised Mainstream

I’ve written a guest post for the Marginalised Mainstream blog. This has been set up by the people running a London conference in early November about the sort of mainstream literature (and other entertainment) that tends to miss out on academic analysis. Judging by the provisional conference programme this brief has been interpreted pretty widely;  […]

Paul Fussell, 1924-2012

2nd Lieut. Paul Fussell. I was saddened to hear of the death last week of Paul Fussell. He is a critic whom I have often argued against, in these blog posts and elesewhere, but he was an important writer and an invigorating one. I would argue that he got many things wrong in The Great […]

For your diary

Updated with changed dates. Have you bought your 2014 diary yet? If not, you should probably do so, as the year promises to be crammed with commemorative occasions. The most promising I’ve come across so far is a conference on First World War poetry at Wadham College, Oxford, September 5th to 7th. It’s organised by […]

Rudyard Kipling: International Writer

Bloomsbury is not a locality one associates with Rudyard Kipling. It is, let’s face it, those spiritual home of the experimenters in Social Relations so sceptically described in ‘My Son’s Wife’. Never mind that. The ever-hospitable Institute of English Studies at London University was the venue for the conference Rudyard Kipling: International Writer last weekend, […]

Diary dates

Autumn is a busy time. Here are a few forthcoming events: October 21-22 Rudyard Kipling: An International Writer Two-day conference at the Institute of English Studies, University of London, Senate House. Details here. (I shall be giving a paper on Kipling’s representation of Germans, in ‘Mary Postgate’ and elsewhere.) 9th November Strange Joy : The […]

The M-word

I spent three days last week at a most enjoyable conference in London: The Popular Imagination and the Dawn of Modernism: Middlebrow Writing 1890-1930. The papers I liked best were (predictably, I suppose) those that discussed books that I had pondered during the course of my researches: If Winter Comes; A Prince of the Captivity; […]