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 [...]
The Masculine Middlebrow Conference at the Senate House in London was a most enjoyable two days. It’s always good to get together with people equally obsessed by literature that is off the beaten track.
Jonathan Wild started proceedings with a lucid account of how the Boer War helped to create the middlebrow reading public, turning citizens [...]
I’m very glad to say that Alan Hewer’s excellent Great War Dust Jackets site is once more up and running. A week or so back I was horrified to find that it had disappeared from the Internet.
It turned out that Lycos, Alan’s Internet Service Provider, had become a victim of the recession and had closed [...]
February 15, 2009 – 10:12 am
John Shapcott, who is organising the annual Arnold Bennett Society conference at Stoke, has sent me this cartoon from 1917, showing Bennett and Wells as war correspondents competing at the Front.
The cartoon suits the theme of this year’s conference, which is Bennett and Wells: Their Friendship, Fiction and Films. It is co-sponsored by the H.G.Wells [...]
February 11, 2009 – 2:49 pm
I’d woried about the snow, but the fields got greener as I headed north to Birmingham, and after all there were no transport problems.
I gave a paper about fiction magazines during the war, making the case that if these carried propaganda, it was not because some government propaganda machine demanded it (There was no such machine at [...]
February 9, 2009 – 10:41 pm
So is it going to snow again? Tomorrow I’m scheduled to give a paper to the Centre for First World War Studies seminar in Birmingham, on fiction magazines, 1914-1918.
I was offered a choice of dates, and I turned down January because I thought it might be snowy.
So will I be able to get to [...]
