We went to hear A C Grayling at the Birmingham Book Festival on 23rd October; he was giving a talk on Reading. In strong comparison with his talk of 2007 on Liberty I found some of hs central contentions this time highly questionable. This is n

 It is obvious that Book Reviews are subjective, biased and ideological. I would certainly not claim to be free from any of these faults when reviewing for Reviewing the Evidence. But once in a while one comes across a case where there are two r

 I was surprised and delighted to be invited to join the reviewers at the mystery fiction review site Reviewing the Evidence (http://www.reviewingtheevidence.com/) by the site's editor, a true expert , Sharon Wheeler. The 'job' invol

 The Birmingham book Festival was once a major event but in recent years it has declined into a patetic populist charade populated by the latest celebrity biographers and aimed at boosting Waterstone's profoits as far as one could tell. This

 This entry should, of course, come before the last one. But then I didn't get around to writing about our 2005 holiday until March 06 and managed nothing at all about last years. I suppose writing about holidays is exactly the kind of self-

 Linebaugh in The London Hanged (p14) writes..." new morality became triumphant among the cpaitalist class at the end of the seventeenth century. Christopher Hill contrasted it with the religious attitudes prvailing earlier: 'Labou

 I do occasionally jot down some headings on subjects about which I might care to write; it is interesting to look back and see what remains of interest after a few months.  But first some more immediate notes. Last week we watched Pau

 Unsually this is a fairly straight reproduction of a list post - in this case to WWTTA on the subject of Dorothy Richardson's Pilgrimage Books 1-3 (Volume 1). I have put it here in addition partly because I have found the book so fascinatin

 I have been attending a local Mystery reading group - the Erdington Crime Fiction Reading Group - at my local library for a few months now. This is partly as a result of Mark (my therapist/analyst) encouraging me to participate in more 'rea

  I have been infected with a cold over the last week and have therefore been writing much less than usual. So I thought a quick Diary entry catching up with the two most important cultural events in my life over the past 10 days would be worthw

I have decided to embark on an occasional blog charting the progress of a re-reading (the 10th? 20th?) of Anthony Powell's Dance to the Music of Time. This is not intended as literary criticism, although there will no doubt be attempts at this, b

   A superb South Bank show documentary on Marianne Faithfull; film from a recent concert, and a couple of interviews, the main one being conducted by Bragg (not a favourite of mine but I must admit this was a good, fairly self-effacing int

I have decided from time to time to create what might be termed a Diary Blog. This is necessarily a somewhat self-indulgent exercise but since this blog is a form of therapy for me (indeed this may be its chief value!) this objection has little force

Another very belated enrty this time on the subject of the St Hilda's Crime and Mystery Conference 2006, which was held, as usual, at St Hilda's College, Oxford in August 2006.

 The final session of the Tuesday morning was again in panels. I attended the one called Gender and Narrative Construction (1). The first paper was Ellen's - this can be found in full at....http://www.jimandellen.org/trollope/comfortromance.

 On the final session of the Monday I again attended a different pane to Ellen; the title of the panel was 'Its a Boy Thing: Emerging Manhood'. The first paper was given by Stephen Amarnick which was based on his detailed textual re

Way back in the heatwave of last July I attended a Conference about Trollope at the University of Exeter.

I return after a long absence due to depression (the latter should probably now go without saying on this blog!). I will no doubt write some more about this latest bout but thought I would start by writing the entry I might have written when I got ba

 At the ECW list we are reading Bate's biography of John Clare. I was not too sure about the earlier parts of the book, both becuase it seemed to me that Bate was failing to provide an adequate context for the political and literary world which form

 The following is a reproduction of something I wrote for the Yahoo Reading Group BritishMysteries (which can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/britishmysteries/ ) and is concerned with a persona scheme for the classifiction of mystery nove