The Folk Hall at New Earswick. My first go at this prompt related to a vague memory of the recitation of a speech from Measure for Measure (see it at this link). Since then, my friend, Ann, who has been my friend since we both went to Wooldale Primary School, has reminded me of much … More An Addendum to my first version of this: My friend Ann says I Recited ‘The Collar’
Ian McEwan states in his novel’s title a concern with What We Can Know. Clearly, this concern with the nature and limits of knowledge is central to the conduct of history including predictive history, biography and the study of the art or even counterfactual forms of those things. However, the epigram of this novel, taken … More Ian McEwan states in his novel’s title a concern with ‘What We Can Know’. Clearly, this concern with the nature and limits of knowledge is central to the conduct of history including predictive history, biography and the study of the art or even counterfactual forms of those things. However, the epigram of this novel, taken from the biographer Richard Holmes, implies that biography embodies ‘human truths poised between fact and fiction’ themselves which requires the question of ‘what we can know’ but also goes on to ask ‘what we can believe, and finally what we can love’.
When Tennyson published the lyric usually recalled as a Christmas and New Year hymn in 1850, he was as keen to eradicate old corruptions as welcome new vigour, although he lefts the politics of the change he wanted vague in order not to contradict any powers that be. The point of the poem remains is … More Ring out the darkness of the land! If only!
The fever of seeking recognition is at least one of the characteristics in the origin of the social, or aristocratic, vampire in literary myth. We could all do fame-seeking! A case study based on John William Polidori’s life and writing, [OR], ‘He watched him; and the very impossibility of forming an idea of the character … More The fever of seeking recognition is at least one of the characteristics in the origin of the social, or aristocratic, vampire in literary myth. We could all do less fame-seeking! A case study based on John William Polidori’s life and writing, OR …
One line in a poem of complicated love between women, written to Brigid Brophy, by Iris Murdoch reads: ‘Don’t make of sex a basic category’. To her journal she committed the following reflection about herself: ‘It’s no good being a female queer, one must be a male one’: This is a blog on Murdoch’s Queer … More This is a blog on Murdoch’s Queer Poetry. Is it a layer of Queer History or the record of a Psychosocial Anomaly? It is based on Iris Murdoch (ed. Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson, Rachel Hirschler & Frances White) [2025] ‘Poems from an Attic: Selected Poems 1936 – 1995’
Reading ‘right now’ or reading forever! In truth I am reading a newly published book of poems by Iris Murdoch, and I think I would like to blog more seriously on them later. They are published as the result of a dusty box of manuscripts being found after searching the attic of the late home … More Reading ‘right now’ or reading forever!
To the memory of John Burnside and in dear friendship for Joanne, I contemplate. the poet’s posthumous lines: ‘and everything they loved / is erstwhile, in the empire of forgetting: / …’ [*] There is nothing that once were the objects of our lives that can be remembered in their entirety, hence the fact that … More To the memory of John Burnside and in dear friendship for Joanne, I contemplate. the poet’s posthumous lines: ‘and everything they loved / is erstwhile, in the empire of forgetting: / …’
‘The departed are yet to arrive / … / but the roads are all laid out: /’ [1] There is no ideal time to pay more attention to the details past than the death that inevitably defines a ‘life’ and picks out its salient meaning. This is a blog referring to a first reading of … More ‘The departed are yet to arrive / … / but the roads are all laid out: /’ There is no ideal time to pay more attention to the details past than the death that inevitably defines a ‘life’ and picks out its salient meaning. This is a blog referring to a first reading of Simon Armitage (2025) ‘New Cemetery’.
I have always felt the words of the New Testament contained the truths by which we could and perhaps ought to live – and continue to respect them whilst being in a state of absolute non-belief in the existence of a god, or gods. Recently as I thought about this question I again came across … More Having is less than Being and Being is less than Doing!
It brings ‘a tear of joy’ finding truth in fiction and authenticity in mere performance. Here is an example: Liz Duffy Adams’ Born with Teeth; Reflections after reading the text. In an earlier blog post at this link, I said that I would revisit Liz Duffy Adams play Born with Teeth once I had chance … More It brings ‘a tear of joy’ finding truth in fiction and authenticity in mere performance. Here is an example: Liz Duffy Adams’ ‘Born with Teeth’; Reflections after reading the text.
Somehow twilight at evening draws us to favour it. Why? After all it promises us nothing but the night, unless we hope to make the next day the first of the ‘rest of our life’! When I was a student at University College London, I used to find myself walking through Russell Square to and … More Somehow twilight at evening draws us to favour it. Why? After all it promises us nothing but the night, unless we hope to make the next day the first of the ‘rest of our life’!
The best known quatrain of Persian Poetry, in stolid Victorian translation is that from what The Poetry Foundation calls the ‘Rubáiyát, his collection of hundreds of quatrains (or rubais), was first translated from Farsi into English in 1859 by Edward Fitzgerald’, attributed to Omar Khayyam. There are versions on versions of the quatrains translated, not least by Fitzgerald . … More If I use the verb ‘to write’, do I really mean that what I write must or should endure
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