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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
January 26, 2009 – 11:36 pm
The little counter at the side of my blog today hit the 100,ooo mark. that means 100,ooo page views of posts on here, mostly by humans (I think Wordpress have a mechanism for discounting searches by Googlebots or whatever.) It’s taken two and a half years. The average is about a hundred a day. Many [...]
January 20, 2009 – 8:08 am
The reason I’ve not been blogging much over the past few weeks is that I haven’t been looking at much new (to me) stuff. I’m at a stage with my thesis now when I’m rewriting, improving and clarifying what I’ve written before, trying to get it into a final shape. And abridging, too. When I [...]
October 12, 2008 – 4:01 pm
The big exhibition to mark the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice is definitely worth seeing, though I have a few reservations about it.
It mostly consists of ninety boxes, each one containing mementoes of someone connected with the war. Each box is lit by electric bulbs on the end of long white stalks – so the [...]
Shortly after the Great War, Arnold Bennet wrote two very good novels about money, its joys and its terrors. The hero of Mr Prohack suddenly comes into a fortune, and Bennett analyses the change that this makes in the habits of a previously cautious civil servant, as he discovers exciting new worlds of possibility.
Riceyman [...]
Marion and I went to London on Wednesday and stayed till Friday. During that time I managed to squeeze in quite a few research-related activities.
On Wednesday I went exploring in Clerkenwell, trying to retrace one of my favourite walks in twentieth-century literature, the stroll of Henry Earlforward and Mrs Arb on a Sunday morning in [...]
I spent yesterday at the Oxford University Press, as a member of a graduate workshop about investigating publishers’ archives. It was a most enjoyable day.
We gathered in a smart conference room next to the Great Clarendon Street reception area, taking our places at a long table. In front of each chair, as well as the [...]
I’m back now from a long weekend in Hay-on-Wye, with my wife, daughter and son-in-law. When a friend of my daughter’s heard where we were all going, he said, “Hay-on-Wye? You lot’ll be like pigs on smack.”
Which is true enough. Hay really is the ideal destination for a family of booklovers with a dog who [...]
