The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, London: Picador, 2011, 576 pages, £20 paperback, ISBN: 0330483242 Till from the garden and the wild A fresh association blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger’s child; Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ I’ve just finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child. I bought it at the beginning of June in Cardiff after running a conference there on ‘Material Religion’. Exhausted and falling asleep on the train, I put it away
Read moreCategory: Digital Forum
Discriminating Fossils – the crystal models belonging to the Watt family, c.1800
by Jane Insley (curator) and Valerie McCathern (volunteer; this project was Valerie’s fault, so she is co-author!) Science Museum, London. Image One: Watt workshop The Science Museum has recently opened a new permanent exhibition about the 18th century steam pioneer James Watt. This had two main aims – one, the redisplay in public view of the garret workshop James Watt set up in Heathfield, his retirement home, and the other, to make more sense of the huge steam engines in
Read moreStudying Nineteenth Century Media: Marking the Shift from ‘Reader’ to ‘User’
Clare Horrocks, Liverpool John Moores University C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age by James Mussell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, vii + 232 pages, illustrated, £55 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-230-23553-3 In this much-awaited volume on the impact of the digital age on our study of the nineteenth century press, James Mussell is able to demonstrate how the traditional monograph no longer serves the professional needs of the academy (xi). Identifying a new era for research he asserts that there are
Read moreNot-reading: the Burden of the Book
Maria Damkjær, King’s College London maria.damkjaer@kcl.ac.uk How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, by Leah Price, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012, ix + 350 pages, illustrated, £19.95 (hardback), ISBN: 9780691114170 The dust jacket of Leah Price’s book is dominated by an image of cannibalised printed pages, cut and twisted into paper flowers. This, and the title How to Do Things with Books, might lead the reader to think that Price is writing about material books and
Read moreBlogging Questions: Do you have any advice or tips on how to start a blog?
Blogging Question: How do you want your readers to engage and read your blogs?
Blogging Questions: How do you read and engage with blogs?
Lee Jackson Q&A session on his ‘The Diary of a Murder’
Lee Jackson‘s ‘Diary of a Murder’ kick started our book club. Here he answers our questions. Thanks to Kylie Mirmohamadi and Lucinda Matthews-Jones for providing questions. 1) What sparked your creative juices into writing in ‘The Diary of a Murder’? i.e. was it a particular novel/s, event/s or primary source? It’s an idea that I’ve had for a long time – a diary as murder mystery – that arose from reading Arthur Munby’s peculiar diaries and the anonymous sex marathon
Read moreBook Review: Bloody Victorians: Violence and Historical Narrative
Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London, by Rosalind Crone, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, xv + 304 pages, illustrated, £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978 0 7190 8685 4 Reviewed by Sara Hackenberg, San Francisco State University shackenb@sfsu.edu Sweeny Todd refuses to die. Ever since his 1846 debut in Lloyd’s sensational serial, The String of Pearls, the murderous barber of Fleet Street has been adapted countless times into literary, dramatic, cinematic, musical, and even balletic forms, most recently in Tim Burton’s
Read moreBook review: Never Such Innocence
Visions of England, by Roy Strong. London: Bodley Head, 2011, viii + 229, illustrated, £17.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-847-92160-4 Reviewed by Mark Storey, University of Nottingham Among the many figures, institutions and traditions admitted to Roy Strong’s pantheon in Visions of England, one surprising omission is Philip Larkin. He would seem at first glance a perfect candidate: the pastoral impulse which Strong locates as the binding force throughout English cultural history finds a distinctly twentieth-century articulation in much of
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