William Blake and the Forging of the Self
T. S. Eliot and La Figlia Che Piange
Today’s younger readers approaching T. S. Eliot’s poetry for the first time are faced with two alternatives. They can…
Beryl Bainbridge’s Major Phase
The second half of the twentieth century had no ‘Bloomsbury Group’ as such. In his first book, The Movement,…
Self and Sensibility: the Poetics of Romanticism
God is nothing but the individual to the highest power. Friedrich Schlegel in Kritische Ausgabe, 1797 A world of…
The Scholar as Sisyphus: Publishing Remembering Iris Murdoch
The tortuous attempts to get my latest book into print illuminate the cur- rent state of scholarly publishing, reveal…
Trouble in the Avant-Garde
Contemporary art is big business nowadays, in more ways than one. It is has become a major refuge for…
Recanati and Leopardi
Where I am reading can become so inextricably bound to what I am reading that in recalling the book…
A Short History of Name-Dropping
The term is recent, its history short. Name-dropping was coined a term shortly after the second world war, in…
The Making of a Rhapsodic Quilt: Roland Barthes And The Deconstruction of Self
I am not contradictory; I am dispersed. Roland Barthes on Roland Barthes To write on oneself may seem a pretentious…
The Creative Moment, Part Two: Owen and Plath
Wilfred Owen, the finest English war poet, was born in Shropshire, the eldest son of a minor railway official…
Poe and Me
My introduction to Edgar Allan Poe came about courtesy of the twenty-volume Book of Knowledge, an American children’s encyclopaedia…
Unbound
Pele Cox’s dramatical production of ‘Unbound’ sees ‘the triangle of affection’ between Mary, Shelley and Byron…
The Life and Art of Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Thomas Wyatt is appreciated today principally for his poetry. In his own time, however, as well as producing some…
Retailing History: the Rushdie Effect
The world was gulled from the start into imagining that a magical star had risen on the literary horizon…
The Mystery of Charles Baudelaire’s Mistress
Baudelaire’s relationship with his muse, Jeanne Duval, also known as his ‘Black Venus’…
Object Lessons
I’m a relentless accumulator of objects – in other words an impassioned collector, quite unable to restrain myself from…
The Creative Moment Part One
Keats and Rimbaud We are perennially fascinated by how poets transcend their early work, fulfill their potential and create…
Mortality and Dream … and a Love of Good Books
I sometimes wonder what book I would read if I knew it were to be my last. Candide would…
G. M. Hopkins, Inscape and Sprung Rhythm
During his lifetime the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) had a readership of only a handful of his…
Sir Walter – the History Man
Sir Walter Scott’s work is little read nowadays, yet everywhere there are reminders of his former status. In the…
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