Keats Grove, Hampstead John Keats was not just a poet – although he was certainly that: a wonderfully 'haunting' poet, bard of the 'frozen ecstasy', the fatalistic 'erotic sensibility' and the simultaneity of 'sensuality and stasis', as Rowan Williams says. But Keats had a medical career too. He worked as the apprentice to the apothecary Thomas Hammond in Edmonton and then in Guy's Hospital, studying under the renowned surgeon Sir Astley Cooper. To one who has been long in ci

Marks of weakness, marks of woe Emily Dickinson I tried to leap off – But my – grim, rumpled – bag – stuck – In the tube door – ow.   William Wordsworth I wandered lonely As a cloud of frenetic Ash-faced corporate pigs.   John Keats I swoon! O! – Thou ripe, Gushing, blushing, pulsing phrase: ‘Elizabeth Line’!   E E Cummings why do i do this i hate this coffee and life the clouds grin greenly   Philip Larkin Old toad. I’m bored and Sad. Time weeps on. I’ll jump out Of that hig

Caspar David Friedrich, 'Wanderer Above the Sea of Mist', 1818 I rave about Schubert nearly as much as I do Wordsworth. In fact, although I doubt they’d have been friends - Schubert was rather too insalubrious and lascivious than his more ostensibly stolid, morally ascetic counterpart - they share a vast amount in common.  Sadly, neither knew of each other’s existence, but here I hope we can gauge a sense of their mutual affinity with some of Romanticism’s fundamental princip

Media voices are increasingly citing Andy Burnham as the UK’s most promising new Prime Minister. The ‘King of the North’ was ranked 12 th...

This is the story of a couple so poorly We gaze upon Thrace, where the tale takes place; There never was a story of more fuss Than this...

Love. One of humanity’s greatest mysteries: that which Homer described in the Iliad  as ‘magic to make the sanest man go mad’, which...

Cambridge (and Oxford) are amazing places, where, for centuries, bastions of historic study and intellect walked the very same streets,...

(source: getty images) I read Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’ (1850), Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ (1865) and Swinburne’s ‘Ave Atque Vale’ (1868) to...

(source: getty images) When John Rieder argues that the real conflict of Prometheus Unbound  ‘lies not between Prometheus and Jupiter but...

(source: getty images) Throughout both Aurora Leigh and North and South , Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Elizabeth Gaskell interrogate...

(source: getty images) (My research into this area is still undergoing - more recently I have done some work on Blake's 'Jerusalem' and...

(source: getty images) George Orwell wrote in 1940 that ‘no one’ had ‘written better about childhood’ or ‘shown the same power entering...

(source: getty images) There is a dislocation between Williams Barnes’s use of a dialect he didn’t himself use as schoolmaster and...

(source: getty images) When record label owner and producer Tony Wilson described Manchester as ‘the fertile breeding ground, field ready...

Ave atque vale to my welfare emails; here is my final stint in office, a florilegium of Lent Term’s belles-lettres.  Canto 1 Welcome to...

(source: getty images) Throughout Pamela , Samuel Richardson’s repeated use of the word ‘creature’ has been linked to the novel’s...

(source: getty images) Renunciation in Middlemarch  pivots against George Eliot’s belief in a need for self-sufficiency and necessary...

@acphotos As Nativity 2’s Angel Matthews said,  ‘wow, wow, wow; in other words, game over’. This was certainly the atmosphere following...

(source: getty images) To put it plainly, this is my most important scoop to date. Forget Babbitty Rabbitty: the time for jejune yarns is...

As promised at the end of my initial compilation ('Rapid Production of Satirical Copy'), I attach here my Michaelmas mesh of...