I wrote some verse for Catherine’s birthday and read it to her yesterday on our celebration dinner at Alishaan in Durham, the present from Geoff and I on her special day. As usual with me for some birthdays, the verse is an acrostic like that Mr Elton prepares for Harriet Smith to please Emma in … More To Catherine on her birthday on the 3rd May 2026
The question should be why would or should you vote in political elections! The Guardian today, with the gloomy collage below, is predicting unprecedented losses for the Labour Party. Yet the current Labour Leader won power in his party by saying no party should promote any policy that would make it ‘unelectable’. It seems now … More The question should be why would or should you vote in political elections! ‘The Guardian’ today is predicting unprecedented losses for the Labour Party. Yet the current Labour Leader won power in his party by saying no party should promote any policy that would make it ‘unelectable’. It seems now that this ideology has created the least electable party of modern voting history. Is voting in political elections ever a matter of principle in politics?
‘boustrophedon, one of the loveliest words in the English language, …’. If only the aims of life were not so ‘chopped up’, end-stopped and linear, we might realise that ‘in our minds’ are ‘only sinuous furrows of thought’. [1] This blog reflects on Yann Martel’s novel, ‘Son of Nobody’. Of course, writing is about giving … More ‘boustrophedon, one of the loveliest words in the English language, …’. If only the aims of life were not so ‘chopped up’, end-stopped and linear, we might realise that ‘in our minds’ are ‘only sinuous furrows of thought’. This blog reflects on Yann Martel’s novel, ‘Son of Nobody’.
What better thing to do in the gay community than remind it of its history and honour its actors: What counts as daring in the face of being true to love! Stefan Haupt’s 2014 film The Circle and the dilemma of postwar 20th century queer representations of love between men in Europe. Left to right: … More What better thing to do in the gay community than remind it of its history and honour its actors: What counts as daring in the face of being true to love! Stefan Haupt’s 2014 film ‘The Circle’ and the dilemma of postwar 20th century queer representations of love between men in Europe.
Tchaikovsky could only mount the story of Eugene Onegin according to the strict material limits of the nineteenth century opera and its conventions. There must be three Acts. What must have been clear to him that these acts needed each to revolve around a central dramatic encounter – of course three such were obvious. And … More Is being productive the issue? Producing art or understanding thereof is more often about the analysis of the unproductive or listless: in Russian, the state of ‘khandra’. This blog is a case study based on preparions for seeing The Metropolitan Opera’s ‘Eugene Onegin’ streamed to Durham Gala on the 6th June.
Directing a man’s future being, or, Trans-ing Eugene Onegin Let’s divert the question a moment, because I am preparing myself to see Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin streamed (the second time for the opera but then I only saw a live student production: see this blog) from the Metropolitan Opera, and in the middle of re-reading the … More Directing a man’s future being, or, Trans-ing Eugene Onegin
Should we ever regret taking the risk of not giving a straight answer to a queer question? In My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: a fiction, Deborah Levy examines, amongst other things why: ‘Stein had put so much in the way. In the way of understanding. She did not believe in it’. [1] The … More Should we ever regret taking the risk of giving a straight answer to a queer question? In her new novel, ‘My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein: a fiction’, Deborah Levy examines, amongst other things why: ‘Stein had put so much in the way. In the way of understanding. She did not believe in it’. The narrator of the novel continually asks: ‘What is it?’ of numerous ‘its’ that are so often getting lost to good, ill or mixed ends. What’s wrong with being always understood?
In the seventeenth century educated persons kept commonplace books where things they heard or read could be stored for use or as a momento of the use they had already served, and might, if remembered in this way, serve again. Sometimes they consisted of practical guides to a task, like a recipe, although it was … More ‘The world was all before them, where to choose?’ or ‘The earth is all before me … I cannot miss my way’. Looking for direction: how to use a quotation about using a quotation for guidance, and the perils of the freedom to choose!
Making you the man of nerve you are: from hard resilience to soft retreat. A case study based on Nicholas Boggs (2026) Baldwin: A Love Story and the import he detects in Baldwin’s role as director of Düşenin Dostu (Friend of the Fallen in English), the Turkish version with its tellingly moralistic new Turkish title, of … More Making you the man of nerve or nerves you are: from hard resilience to soft and fearful retreat. A case study based on Nicholas Boggs (2026) ‘Baldwin: A Love Story’ and the import he detects in Baldwin’s role as director of ‘Düşenin Dostu’ (‘Friend of the Fallen’ in English), the Turkish version of John Herbert’s ‘Fortune and Men’s Eyes’ in Istanbul.
Sonnet 29 is used to provide the title, and is quoted in full as its message, by a non-binary character in prison named by inmates as ‘Mona’ (after Mona Lisa), of John Herbert’s Fortune and Men’s Eyes, an important if not a very good queer play, and in 1971 a minor film, no longer easily … More Cashing in on ‘Thy sweet love remembered’:Some preliminary thoughts on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 before some historical reflection on its use in queer literary culture in the twentieth century
The lines that hold the sails in tension now fret, or so the sounds they fake suggests, a keen low scream that might be just the gale that’s set to lengthen distance to safe harbour, seen Through gaps between each white wave peak as if security were not what vessels seek. A night at sea … More ‘Sleep’s a trouble, dreams pitch too persistent / the stresses of the day before that dawn / when truly come, promises that it’s sent /to build our worn self up, just less forlorn’. Verse written on assessing the aftermath of a day that’s made too many demands upon you!
‘Man measured his words like food and decided what was worth opening his mouth for’.[1] No-one measures his words like Derek Owusu, and no writer has pursued the link between food and the ‘matter’ that is, as in Hamlet (Act 2, Scene 2, 204ff.), ‘Words, words, words’, (whether spoken or written) like him since Shakespeare. … More ‘Man measured his words like food and decided what was worth opening his mouth for’. Words and food in Derek Owusu (2026) ‘Hunger Pains’ for The Reading Agency Quick Reads.
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