Author Archives: admin

At Abbotsford

A writer’s birthplace like that of Shakespeare’s is of course in some sense a ‘writer’s house’. But it is almost never the house in which the writing has actually been done, the workshop of genius. One house that does speak … Continue reading

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Celebrating Shakespeare’s Birthday

So here I am again in Stratford-upon-Avon, togged up in my increasingly disreputable DPhil gown from Oxford (this year the blue facings seem not only to have faded to a definite mauve, but to have become weirdly blotchy), carrying a … Continue reading

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At Burns’s Mausoleum

Today’s adventure leaves the warmth of Rome for the wet of Scotland (brrr!), and a must-see location for the pilgrim to poetic graves, Robert Burns’s mausoleum in Dumfries. In my last posts I described how my journeys to the graves … Continue reading

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At the Graves of Keats and Shelley, Rome

Easily one of the greatest pleasures of literary tourism is the excuse it provides for travelling all over.  In my last post I described my little adventure to the grave of Thomas Gray. Today I am going further afield, fast-forwarding … Continue reading

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At a poet’s grave in a country churchyard

  Today’s adventure took me to Stoke Poges, to what is quite possibly the most famous churchyard in Britain. And why is it so famous, you ask? Well, this is the ‘country churchyard’ which Thomas Gray wrote about in his … Continue reading

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Series 1: Adventures of a literary stalker

So there I was, standing soaked right through to my M & S bra high up on the Yorkshire moors, peering through the twilight to get a photo of a cliff annoyingly obscured by gusts of rain. Ten minutes later, … Continue reading

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The writer’s desk

The writer’s desk Weimar is home to a lot of history, not least the Weimar republic, Hitler, and Buchenwald – but I went to research happier times, the so-called ‘Goethe-zeit’ when Goethe, having single-handedly dreamt up German romanticism with his … Continue reading

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Austen at her desk

Last June, I went to Winchester Cathedral to marvel at their flower festival, and, as a scholar of Austen, to photograph the grave, brass plaque, and stained-glass window that between them memorialise her there. Plunging into a particularly excited and … Continue reading

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Dogs of Genius

Post 9 Dogs of Genius August 2013 In the dog-days of August all academics should be on the beach rather than in the research library. It is the silly season, and its silliness may suitably tinge even the serious business … Continue reading

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Travels in the Library

Post 8 Travels in the Library July 2013 These last two weeks, I have been hunkered down in the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, reading. To my right, coat, bag, phone, and a pile of eighteenth … Continue reading

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