Writing about Rose

For the past year I’ve been writing about Rose Allatini, and the book is nearly ready for publication. It should be available to buy by the start of June. I’ve called it Rose Allatini: A Woman Writer. Why? Because Olive, the novelist heroine of …Happy Ever After, her first book, declared: ‘I want to be […]

Handheld Press

This is just as note to say that I’ve heard from Kate Macdonald that her new venture Handheld Press is about to begin publishing. The first titles are reprints of Ernest Bramah’s 1907 political thriller What Might Have Been  ( a fantasy of what life might be like under a Labour government) and John Buchan’s The […]

P.G. Wodehouse and the First World War

A while ago I wrote a chapter on Wodehouse and the War for a collection, Middlebrow Wodehouse, that tried to locate PGW in the context of his times, and of popular literature. The book appeared, and seems to have sunk without much trace. It was published at the sort of silly academic price that means […]

Richard Blaker essay online

Richard Blaker I’ve added a lengthy essay about the war novelist Richard Blaker to the resources on this site. I wrote it several years ago, and it is in fact a draft of what was to have been a chapter in my Ph.D. thesis, a case study of the changing attitudes towards the war of […]

Middlebrow Wodehouse

I don’t think it’s on general sale yet, but my contributor’s copy of Middlebrow Wodehouse arrived on Saturday. I was very chuffed to see my chapter on Wodehouse and the First World War in print, in such a sturdy and attractive volume.

C. W. Daniel, radical publisher

I spent Tuesday afternoon pleasantly, bookshopping in Sheffield, and bought something of a rarity from Rare and Racy, the books-and-music shop on Devonshire Street. It is a small pamphlet issued as a tribute to pacifist publisher C. W. Daniel, shortly after his death in 1955. I’ve written about Daniel here before, especially after my research […]