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More Tales by Henry James

2012-02-02T10:08:00.000Z

Devotees of the classic short story (and it's more relaxed cousin, the 'tale') should head over pronto to our Henry James sub-site. We've just posted analyses of a number of his greatest stories. As it happens they're all to do with writers and their relationships with readers, the public, and posterity - things which were clearly on the mind of the Master as he approached the climax of his career. The Death of the Lion is a sad tale of a novelist who is swallowed up by his own fans. The Coxon Fund is almost its opposite: a writer and great talker manages to secure a grant from a rich patroness, but then produces nothing for the remainder of his life. The Middle Years is about an author who feels he is about to produce his best work, but needs 'another shot at life' in order to achieve it. And The Figure in the Carpet is a famous literary puzzle: an author claims that there's a hidden pattern in his work and sets critics on a quest to detect it. But he dies before revealing what it is. Every one of these stories is a first class work of art, from a great novelist. Henry James may not be the easiest of writers: his sentences tend to be long and his syntax complex. But he repays attention. Read these tales, and you'll want to read more.

Print on Demand

2012-01-25T18:06:00.000Z

I bought one of those Print on Demand books from Amazon the other day - Volume 9 from the 12 volume set of the Complete Tales of Henry James which was missing from my collection. For some unknown reason volumes 9 and 10 from the wonderful Rupert Hart-Davis edition are now very rare. PoD offers a service of producing rare, classic, or out-of-print texts in a basic paperback format in small quantities - including single copies.

It served its purpose in delivering the text in a more-or-less readable form at a reasonable price (given the rarity of the volume). But it left a lot to be desired. I imagine it has been scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) and formatted using some automated process.

There are no details about the origin of the text; no critical apparatus or footnotes; no introduction, bibliography, or further reading; and no details of any editorial process. There are almost no page margins either. The text is crammed into the page space with no concessions to the reader's visual comfort.

Is the text accurate? Well, it's hard to tell without the definitive version to make a comparison, but I noticed lots of scrappy errors. Foreign expressions are not italicised; m-dashes have been converted to double hyphens; there are missing words, misspellings, and double full stops; and text which is conversation has been rendered as if it was part of the narrative. There are absolutely no concessions to bibliographic aesthetics. New stories begin half way down a page.

These digitised publishing solutions may perform a useful function: better a print-on-demand text than none at all. But eTexts may be close behind. The deficiencies in what's available demonstrate what added value we expect and get from a well-produced and properly edited edition.

Nonesuch Radio

2012-01-03T16:54:00.000Z

Nonesuch Radio offers an excellent streaming service of tracks from its music publishing service. You can choose from jazz, musical theatre, film soundtracks, classical, world, pop, and alternative. But probably the best feature is a random mix, which will expose you to stuff you've probably not heard before. I'm just enjoying Bill Evans, which followed a Stephen Songheim track and Dawn Upshaw.

The Leveson Inquiry

2011-12-21T12:07:00.000Z

The Leveson Inquiry, for all its limitations and weaknesses, might possibly have shed a far-reaching light into the murky regions of power and moral influence in the upper regions of British society.

Previously, the MPs expenses scandal revealed that elected parliamentary representatives and unelected peers of the realm were not averse to stealing from the people they were supposed to be representing. Some went to jail: many did not. But we realised that the first part of Lord Acton's maxim still remains true today: "All power corrupts".

When the inquiry into phone-hacking started we all knew that sleazy tabloid hacks would stop at nothing to get their stories - doorstepping, deception, bribery, diving into dustbins - but I don't think many people were prepared for the depths of cynicism touched on by the grotesque figure of Paul McMullan and his "Privacy is for paedos" bon mot.

But as the days have gone on it's got worse and worse. The so-called journalists all claimed they were under orders - and some of them even claimed to be acting in the public interest. For public interest, read "football players' sex lives" and circulation figures. The buck was passed upwards.

We already know that the newspaper owners were not aware of the criminal invasions of privacy and moral harrassment that were used to provide them with the scandals on which they made their profits. They didn't know - because they told us so. Har har.

Those giving the orders - the senior editors - said the same thing. "I wasn't responsible ... It wasn't my remit ... You'll have to ask somebody else." And then when those responsible for making legal decisions stepped into the box (professional, senior and all rather slimy lawyers) they retreated into Circumlocution Office mode and sidestepped responsibility, doing their best to create the impression that they were men of integrity and honour - when it was quite clear that all the people concerned were from a moral world inhabited by scumbags.

And en route we've had the corruption of the police force thrown in for good measure - a regular system of bribery and the selling of confidential information. Plus collusion between government officials, private investigators, and the Press.

These are people from the top tables, people on six and seven figure salaries, people with celebrity status. Some of them might not actually be guilty of course - but the inquiry is rather like lifing a slab of stone which has been lying for a number of years in the corner of a dirty farm yard. When you lift it up, you recoil with disgust at the mass of low forms of life squirming there.

The Book Strikes Back

2011-12-13T10:37:00.000Z

There's been lots about the eBook revolution recently. Amazon are trying to persuade us that eBooks dominate Xmas 2011 sales - but that's largely because they want to promote their Kindle eBook reader. But if you keep your eye on bricks and mortar bookshops you'll see that print publishers are starting to fight back. What weapons are they using? Well, the old-fashioned production values of typographic style, eye-catching graphic design, and physical desirability. The book is becoming once again an object of desire. If you look at an example such as Alexandra Harris's recent Romantic Moderns you'll see that her publishers Thames and Hudson have commissioned good designers to create aesthetically pleasing jacket covers, they use patterns for the end papers inside the book, choose thick creamy paper for their pages, use a stylish font for the body text, add lots of wide margins and leading, plus full colour photographs and illustrations. The result is a book you haven't seen for ages - something that is pleasing to hold, feel, look at, and own.

Short Stories by Henry James

2011-11-29T14:36:00.000Z

For devotees of the short story, we've just launched several explanatory guides to the work of Henry James. Actually, the stories are not short by modern standards, but they have the distinction of all being very good. The Best in the Jungle is quite well known. It's about a man who has a presentiment that something momentous lies ahead for him in life, but he doesn't know what it will be. Not so well known, but amazingly contemporary in its relevance is The Papers which concerns, would you believe, journalists making up stories for newspapers to generate publicity for would-be celebrities. Four Meetings is an almost tragic tale of a gullible American schoolteacher who has a dream of seeing Europe but is conned out of it by an unscrupulous relative. Two stories are about women in relation to ships. In Pandora a spirited young American woman tweaks the nose of a young German diplomat who she meets on a cross-Atlantic liner, whilst in The Patagonia a similar young woman throws herself overboard rather than meet the man to whom she is going to be married. The Bench of Desolation is not nearly so gloomy as its title suggests, Fordham Castle is a story of an advanced form of social climbing - by pretending to be somebody else - and Daisy Miller is another of his acknowledged masterpieces about Americans in Europe, with the eponymous Daisy breaking social taboos at a cost to herself. Every one a gem, and a tribute to an author known to other writers simply as 'The Master'.

Henry James in Andalucia

2011-11-05T22:09:00.000Z

Just enjoying another reading 'week' here in Mijas, and I have to report that my production quotient has been higher than normal because of unusually bad weather. Some days it's been impossible to move out of the house. But with my trusty book bag alongside, I've managed to get to grips with Daisy Miller (so to speak) plus her fictional sisters in his stories Pandora and The Patagonia. There've also been excursions into boys-stuff Joseph Conrad, with The Secret Sharer and The Shadow-Line. More to come too from Virginia Woolf and Thomas Hardy - but that will depend on the weather.

Joseph Conrad and the novella

2011-10-31T17:11:00.000Z

Joseph Conrad explored just about every genre of prose fiction. He wrote novels, long and short stories, travel books, memoirs, essays, and even experimented with collaborative writing. But the genre in which he seems to be most comfortable and in which he created some of his most carefully crafted works is the novella. This is a work which is longer than a story but shorter than a novel. But it's not just a matter of length. The novella usually has very few characters, the events of the narrative are concentrated on a single issue, and that issue itself is usually of universal rather than just local or temporary significance.

A short story may be based on no more than an anecdote, whereas a novella deals with large scale general themes. A novel can have a cast of dozens and feature multiple locations, whereas a novella can have just two or even one main character, and the setting is likely to remain focussed in one place.

We've just posted study guides to two of Conrad's best novellas, both of them based on his own experiences as a young sea captain. The Shadow-Line deals with the character-building drama of a ship which is becalmed with a sick crew, and The Secret Sharer explores notions of 'the double' and 'alternative selves' when a young captain allows a murderer to hide on board his ship.

More on the novella here

Marcel Proust and Manchester

2011-10-26T20:52:00.000+01:00

I was pleased to note recently that Marcel Proust had an active connection with Manchester, my native city. He was very much influenced by the writing of John Ruskin, whose famous lectures on culture and society Sesame and Lilies were delivered there in 1864. And whilst translating Ruskin's work into French, Proust was assisted by English born Marie Nordlinger, who was cousin of the French composer Reynaldo Hahn, who in his turn was Proust's lover. Marie Nordlinger lived in Rusholme, the same suburb where Ruskin had made his presentations. It's an area all now swallowed up into the behemoth which is The University of Manchester. Frederick Engels also lived just round the corner, but as a cultural footnote to this posting, the postbox in which he dropped his letters to Marx (including cheques) still exists there on Oxford Road.

False Readings

2011-10-14T12:35:00.000+01:00

Many years ago, in a search for direction with literary studies, I read a guide which recommended Madame Bovary as one of the greatest romantic love stories. I dashed out and bought a copy, and couldn't understand the disjunction between what I was looking for and what was being delivered. It was anything but romantic. I was reading the right novel - but with the wrong preconceptions. Flaubert wrote it as an anti-romantic novel. The same thing happened when I read Moby Dick, commended by the same guide as 'a gripping chase of the Great White Whale'. After six hundred pages, I was wondering when this chase would ever begin.

And now fifty years later, the same thing has just happened in reverse. I decided to re-read Joseph Conrad's famous novella The Secret Sharer, got my copy of a well-edited text from Amazon, and started making notes on 'the double', ambiguities of 'sharing', youthful maturing experiences, and so on. But I was puzzled by the amount of time it was taking the escaping swimmer Leggat to appear alongside. I was half way through the book, and the captain had only just boarded his new command. Then I realised I was reading not The Secret Sharer but The Shadow Line. Right approach - wrong book. Doh!

Join the team!

2011-10-12T15:40:00.000+01:00

Great fun. You can print your own business card and work for the defense secretary Liam Fox. Just click here. Hat tip to Guido at Order-order.com

Virginia Woolf

2011-10-09T11:51:00.000+01:00

We've enlarged the Virginia Woolf section of our site by adding a couple of recently published items. Alexandra Harris had a big success last year with her extended study Romantic Moderns, and she's followed it up pretty smartly with Virginia Woolf. This combines a brief account of Woolf's life history with a very enthusiastic introduction to her major novels. Then, for a taste of the real thing, have a look at On Fiction, a collection of Woolf's essays on writing and the novel. In these she sketches out very elegantly some of the ideas she developed at greater length in later works such as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

Edith Wharton

2011-10-07T18:04:00.001+01:00

Edith Wharton is one of the most unjustly neglected writers of the early modernist period. She was a close friend of Henry James, and even wrote somewhat in his style, but her reputation has not survived as well as his, even though she was a best-selling novelist in her time. We've made a modest effort to rectify this situation from a UK perspective by featuring an impressive biography, as well as creating study guides to her greatest novels The Age of Innocence, The House of Mirth, and The Custom of the Country, as well as her devastatingly powerful novella, Ethan Frome.

False metaphors - Cloud computing

2011-10-04T14:10:00.004+01:00

"Metaphors We Live By", a best-selling publication in the 1980s, drew attention to the fact that we often think and argue in metaphors without being conscious of the fact. Left-wing theories and Right-wing conspiracy have nothing intrinsically right or left abnout them, and if we're not careful we become trapped in a spatial metaphor which is not at all appropriate for clear political thinking.

An example from the world of technology which causes me much amusement is "Cloud computing". It's such an attractive proposition, isn't it? You are sitting at your computer, but your work, and even the software you're using is "out there". You are "working in the Cloud". The image of water vapour floating above the earth is somehow reassuringly vague, light, and insubstantial. It's almost as if God is looking after all your data files.

What is the concrete truth of cloud computing? Well - you are working with a connection to banks of heavy-duty industrial-strength servers, which are located in high-security windowless wharehouses, themselves surrounded by protective barriers and located on industrial estates in obscure corners of the world, with fail-safe and fire-proof backup located somehwere else. There's not much cloud-like about that, is there?

Copyright, New Media, & Plagiarism

2011-07-22T21:08:00.003+01:00

Plagiarism, copyright, and their relation to digital media issues have erupted everywhere recently. There's been the Johaan Hari case, on which we have reported briefly. Copyright challenges crop up all the time in the world on online music. And it's even possible to plagiarise yourself. The safest thing is to learn how to avoid plagiarism, or at least learn how it affects new media.

Hackgate - the movie

2011-07-17T16:31:00.001+01:00

Edith Wharton - An Illustrated Biography

2011-07-06T20:07:00.004+01:00

Edith wharton sure did have it all. She was born of rich parents; she lived in Italy and France as a young girl, and picked up the languages. Married young to rich and handsome husband. Wrote novels - which became best-sellers. Was friends with Henry James, Bernard Berenson, and met Serge Diaghilev. Had love affair: got divorced. Won the Legion of Honour for her work in the first world war. Established large houses and gardens outside Paris and in Provence. Became an expert on garden and interior design. Wrote more best-sellers. And lived until nearly eighty. What's more, her writiting is funny, and very good. More here

Plagiarism and the Johann Hari case

2011-07-04T15:48:00.003+01:00

Plagiarism is back in the spotlight following the Johann Hari scandal. In his journalism for The Independent and elsewhere, he didn't follow the simple rule of acknowledging his sources, he quoted from other people's writing, and he tried to cover up his traces. So we've added new guidance notes to our tutorial on Plagiarism and how to avoid it. And if you want a short online elearning course on the subject, we've got one here. And if that isn't enough we've also created a tutorial on Self-Plagiarism and how to understand it.

Natalia Goncharova - Russian painter

2011-06-25T11:16:00.004+01:00

I came across this very stylish slide show whilst writing a piece on the Russian modernist painter and stage designer, Natalia Goncharova. Further details on her work here.

A New University - or is it?

2011-06-07T09:50:00.004+01:00

A group of Anglo-American professors announced the launch of a new University this week. Here's chancellor A.C.Grayling doing a selling job on why you should stump up fees of £18,000 a year

He claims that all the big transatlantic dons recruited to this enterprise will be personally engaged in teaching. But he doesn't explain how that will work, when all of them already have other full time jobs - some in America.

An article by Cambridge classical scholar Mary Beard in the Times Literary Supplement has attracted masses of critical comment - almost entirely negative.

And because Grayling's organisation piggy-backs on University College London and even uses its curriculum, he has now been accused of plagiarism.

This one should run and run.

MegaCities & Architecture

2011-06-06T14:34:00.003+01:00

I watched the first part of Andrew Marr's new programme MegaCities last night, and he went down even further in my estimation. What a pile of old BBC tosh it was. Breathy enthusiasm from the jug-eared journalist, with some good photography of skyscrapers being built, but absolutely no critical analysis whatsoever. No sociological information on the millions of people throughout the globe turning from agricultural to urban life. No scientific information on the building of structures quarter of a mile high. No insights into the politics and economics of cities, how they are run, or what has caused their recent development. It was like a third-rate weekend supplement 'look at me' piece of tourism masquerading as a Monitor documentary.

Gothic Horror Stories

2011-05-30T17:35:00.004+01:00

For reasons much debated amongst literary historians, there was a revival of the Gothic horror story at the end of the nineteenth century. Within the space of just a few years we have Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), H.G.Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). This is a collection of lesser-known stories from the same period, including some that are ludicrous and even funny. Further details here ...

Gothic Mashups

2011-04-06T12:25:00.007+01:00

The latest of our literary mashups is a short series featuring Gothic novels of the late nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde’s version of the horror story, The Picture of Dorian Gray has entered popular consciousness even amongst people who have not actually read the novel. His central image of a secret ‘portrait in the attic’ is frequently used as a metaphor in cases where people seem to be rather unnaturally preserving their youthful looks. The novel is also packed full of witty epigrams and paradoxes (usually expressed by the character Lord Henry Wotton) which Wilde re-used in the stage plays that made him famous. Within twelve months of publishing Dorian Gray he was at the height of his fame as a writer, a wit, and a dandy. And within another three years he was in jail – convicted of having commited acts of ‘gross indecency’ with other men in private – providing a wonderful example of the claim made in his essay The Decay of Lying (1891), that "Life imitates Art more than Art imitates Life". More on plot, characters, and study resources here >>

World's largest indoor photo - a library

2011-04-01T10:40:00.001+01:00

Bach on Ukelele?

2011-03-16T17:58:00.002Z

A bit ragged round the edges, but the girl's got something!

Shame about the audience.

The world's best pencil sharpener

2011-03-13T13:11:00.002Z

Say "No" to Religion

2011-03-09T17:03:00.006Z

Tick 'No Religion' on the census form. The data gathered is used to inform government policy, and was used by the last government to justify funding of religious community bodies over secular ones. For example, 2001 census data has been used repeatedly to justify an increase in the number of state maintained faith schools and the increasing level of government money spent on faith organisations. By ticking 'No Religion', you will ensure that the Government receives an unambiguous message about the number of non-religious people in the UK.

Any other response may be manipulated into a response in favour of religion and publically funded religious organisations. For instance, writing 'Jedi' is a wasted vote, because it will be counted as 'another religion'. For more information and further reasons to tick 'No Religion', visit The Census Campaign website.

If you don't have an active faith, please make sure the government knows. More info here

3-D in 2-D

2011-03-04T17:41:00.007Z

You would swear that these were 3-D photos, but it's an optical illusion created by phtographing the same object from two different angles, then animating the two shots. More here

Thanks to BoingBoing

eBook Bestseller

2011-03-02T12:42:00.003Z

Good luck to Amanda Hocking, who has struck gold by self-publishing using eBook platforms. But note carefully - it's not just with one book. She's written a series of young adult and zombie thriller books. Vampires R Us!

Virginia Woolf's early stories

2011-02-28T15:56:00.003Z

The latest offering in our book reviews is a charming collection of short stories written in the earliest phase of Virginia Woolf’s career as a writer of modernist fiction when she was only twenty-four years old. Up to that point she had only produced essays and book reviews (some for my home city newspaper, the Manchester Guardian). And in fact the spirit of the reflective essay lingers over these meditations and fictional constructs which have in common the role of women in society. More >>

Jorge Luis Borges

2011-02-25T18:17:00.003Z

We have a new set of materials featuring the great Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges - one of the few authors to create an international reputation on the strength of only having written short stories. The first two item are a short biographical study and a review of The Total Library. His life was full of curious paradoxes (a rhetorical trope which he often features in his stories). He was made head of the National Library - just at the time he became blind; and he lived most of his life with his elderly mother - though he was married twice. Because he only wrote short stories, many people assume that he didn't write very much, but in fact he never stopped writing - producing book reviews, essays, journalism, film reviews, and philosophic studies. The Total Library is an impressive collection of this output, ranging from his earliest newspaper articles from the 1920s to pieces he wrote shortly before his death in 1986.

Gadaffi on Democracy

2011-02-24T16:42:00.004Z

This is mind-boggling irony and hypocrisy combined. Saif Gadaffi lectures at the London Scool of Economics - and his subject? "The Role of Democracy and Dialogue in Civil Society". You couldn't make it up!

Middle East Mashup

2011-02-21T19:00:00.004Z

Guardian trouble spot Mashup

How books used to be made

2011-02-20T01:43:00.001Z

Internet shut down

2011-02-19T14:24:00.004Z

There have been on-off rumours all morning that Gadaffi has shut down the Internet in Libya - just as his fellow dictator did in Egypt a couple of weeks ago. Let's hope the final outcome is similar.

It's been a particular worry to all those Twitter and FaceBook hipsters using the URL-shortening service at Bit.ly, because the .ly domain belongs to Libya. But they needn't worry - because apparently whilst .ly belongs to Libya, of the five "root servers" that make the domain work, only two are in Libya, and all five need to be shut down for .ly URLs to stop working. Two servers are in the US and one is in the Netherlands.

And they can always use TinyURL.com

Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' - a literary mashup

2011-02-17T16:55:00.003Z

Everybody knows the story of Dracula - or do they? There's a lot going on underneath the blood-letting, garlic bouquets, and damsels in distress. If you've not read it before, you might be amazed to learn that it's set in Whitby, Exeter, and London, plus Translylvania of course. The latest in our series of mashups gives you the plot, the characters, and access to the full length film version of the 1922 classic 'Nosferatu'. Plus some thought-provoking commentary. Here >>

Retro-Geeky Art Deco Keyboard

2011-02-15T19:32:00.003Z

Very, very cool - but not cheap. In fact, more expensive than the computer. But understandably so, because it's a work of art. Even more of these lovely objects here

Alfred Hitchcock's 'Vertigo'

2011-01-16T12:08:00.006Z

I watched Hitchcock's 1958 classic for the umpteenth time again last night - and was not surprised to see something new about it. The film now seems to me a story of two men. The first man models one woman after another, then kills the first. The second man does the same. Symmetrical. Part I - Part II. With the explanation in between. Simples. Alternatively, you can see it as two men in love with the same woman. Madeleine is Gavin Elster's accomplice until he kills his wife and leaves for Europe: then she becomes the focus of Scottie's obssession until he overcomes his fear of heights and kills her.

eBooks - and how to make them

2011-01-03T19:07:00.003Z

I've embarked on the quest for yet another technological and eCommerce Holy Grail - the eBook. Having started in print publishing almost twenty years ago, I migrated to software publishing a decade later, then last year converted all my best-sellers to downloadables as the rationale for my new site at mantex.co.uk. Now with the recent growth of eBook reader sales and the lure of free promotion and distribution via Amazon and Google, there is the glow of another potential income stream to pay for the groceries and the wine bill.

But how do you make the damn things? I located some tutorials at IBM, JediSaber, Harrison Ainsworth (that's not the nineteenth century novelist, by the way), and Google Sites. They all claim it's really straightforward - and of course it's not. That's why I've also downloaded a copy of Strahinja Markovic's Sigil.

Tests are under way. I'll report back on developments shortly.

Listen to This - new collection by Alex Ross

2010-12-26T16:30:00.002Z

Listen to This has just appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. Alex Ross has dipped back into his New Yorker essays and produced a collection to follow up on the huge success of his hit last year with The Rest is Noise. As usual, he writes with incredible vigour and passion about both classical and contemporary music, and in this book he even indulges himself with excursions into pop music. Read a full review here ...

Season's Greetings

2010-12-24T17:15:00.003Z

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year to all site visitors

Dorothy Brett - a Bloomsbury painter

2010-12-14T15:50:00.004Z

Dorothy Brett was an upper-class gel who gave her parents trouble, but who got into the Slade School of Art at just the right time. She met Dora Carrington, became a 'crophead', and joined the fast set centred on Ottoline Morrell at her Garsington country estate. Yet Brett remained a virgin until she was forty, and after that went to live in the artists' colony in Texas founded by Mabel Dodge Luhan. And she stayed there for the rest of her life. More detail here

The Train and the River

2010-12-12T11:45:00.003Z

I was amazed to realize that this classic number is now over fifty years old. And just in case somebody tells you otherwise, it's NOT an old folk tune, but an original composition.

James Joyce and Samuel Beckett play golf

2010-12-09T16:20:00.003Z

Seasonal Mashup

2010-12-07T14:37:00.003Z

A cheezy then very clever blending of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer" and Sting's "Roxanne". Give it a few moments.

Reflections on web design

2010-12-06T11:38:00.003Z

More than ten years ago, when creating the first pages for my web site at Mantex, I made the somewhat hair-shirted decision to write all the pages by hand, using only Notepad. After all, most sites at that time were what we would now call primitive - as David Siegel said: "Like slide presentations shown on a cement wall". It was enough to have the excitement of links that worked, and the occasional uploaded graphic. Little did we know then what changes were to come over the enrichment of the online presence.

When I look back at versions of those early pages, I cringe - as I bet you do if you have anything on line which pre-dates the millennium. But I continued putting up data year after year. The site grew; the years passed. Dreamweaver became available, but I continued in my Amish way. Cascading style sheets beckoned, but seemed too steep a learning curve. And before I knew it the site had grown to over a thousand pages. A stylistic improvement could take a whole summer holiday to implement on every page.

When I hit 1,500 pages I knew it couldn't go on. A content management system was the answer to this problem - but even choosing something useable took some time. Now that I've settled on WordPress and begun the monumental task of transferring all those pages, one by one, it forces me to look at the evolution of the web in the last decade or so - and I'm struck by three things - interactivity, eCommerce, and information architecture.

Ten years or so ago site pages were not only like blocks of print transferred to screen: there was also nothing you could do except read them. Now we expect links, comments, dynamic updating, trackbacks, and invitations to participate in one thing or another. On big sites like Amazon we expect to be recognised as soon as we log on. Phew! This is some development.

Ten years or so ago, given the origin of the web in the world of scientific research, advertising was taboo. People went to extraordinary lengths to block adverts, conceal product placement, and prevent anything that smacked of earning a living. Now we recognise that sites need to generate a little something to stay alive. If Joe Schmuck is willing to give away lots of information for free on his site, who are we to complain if he has Google Ads in his side column? The banner ad went through three transformations. First it intruded and got up everybody's nose; then it was ignored; and now it has the sense to slide into a side panel. The user has learned to ignore, tolerate, or filter out ads from the page.

Ten years or so ago we didn't have the tools for organising huge amounts of data - except those of sorting and labelling which were a hangover from the original information architects - librarians. The design solution at the time seemed to be a list of topics in the left column, using frames - remember those? But now content management systems have the built-in tools for categorizing and tagging which mean that we are invited to take meta-data seriously. Information is not really given its full value until it is described, given a title, and linked to others of its kind.

Not only that, but the nifty plug-ins to WordPress I'm using even generate breadcrumb trails and navigation bars automatically. This is all a long way from spidery links on home pages, underlined in default blue, which we saw all those years ago, along with centred logos and animated gifs. There are no doubt plenty more eye-popping developments in the pipeline, but for the web to come of age in just a decade is cause for some sort of awed celebration.

Saxon Sydney-Turner

2010-12-04T15:35:00.002Z

Saxon Sydney-Turner was an unusual member of the Bloomsbury Group in that he was not at all creative, and was renowned as a social bore. Even though he graduated from Cambridge with a double first, he retreated into an undistinguished job in the civil service and stayed there all his life. He wasn't gay; he had very little love interest; and he gambled away all his money. The full downbeat story is here

Nina Hamnett - Queen of Bohemia

2010-12-02T15:00:00.003Z

I'm starting a new series of potted biographies of Bloomsbury Group luminaries. Nina Hamnet was a painter from Wales who swept into Bohemian life, meeting Amedeo Modigliani on her first night in Montparnasse - and going on to befriend (and bed) just about everyone who was anyone on both sides of the Channel. She worked at the Omega Workshops with Roger Fry, and then in the 1920s went into a alcoholic nose dive from which she never recovers. The full story is here

Here Comes Everybody

2010-10-23T12:52:00.002+01:00

Clay Shirky's basic argument is that the advent of social media (email, FaceBook, MySpace, bulletin boards, Flickr) has fundamentally changed people's ability to form and act in groups, because it has reduced the cost of doing so effectively to nothing. This is a similar argument to Chris Anderson's in The Long Tail and FREE: The Future of a Radical Price - that modern digital technology has created a new set of tools and zero-cost opportunities for people to do things that hitherto were the province of small, rich elites. The classic case, now well known, is that of newspapers. When individual bloggers started breaking news stories, the first thing newspapers did was to pour scorn on them. Then, as the tide of 'citizen reporters' grew, the newspapers started their own blogs - written by paid journalists (which is not the same thing of course). Then, when they saw advertising revenues switch from print publications to the online world, they started panicking. And that's where they're at now. Almost all national daily newspapers (in the UK anyway) make a loss. They are what blogger Guido Fawkes calls 'vanity publishing'. The Guardian newspaper for instance has a daily circulation of only 280,000 copies, and operates at a loss of £171 million per year. (It is subsidised by profits from Auto Trader ... more >>

Language Skills

2010-10-02T16:18:00.005+01:00

Talented kid gives good performance. NSFW or your maiden aunt. Students of language will note that he's also impressive with dialect.

Moodle Guide for English teachers

2010-10-01T18:52:00.004+01:00

Moodle has now established itself as the de facto standard eLearning software tool in further and higher education. It's an open source program (which means it's free) and it also acts as a virtual learning environment (VLE) which makes expensive alternatives such as Blackboard redundant. If anybody tells you it’s an easy software program to use, they're lying. Most people will need all the help they can get, even if they are putting some ready made course materials into Moodle’s default templates. That's why books such as this guide to course creation exist - to explain the principles of eLearning design at the same time as offering a guided tour of some Moodle features. English Teacher's Cookbook is aimed at classroom teachers of English for comprehension, writing skills, and composition - but in fact the techniques it demonstrates would be applicable in any humanities subject ...more >>

The Ambassadors - study guidance notes

2010-09-29T18:17:00.006+01:00

Lambert Strether is a middle-aged American widower who is engaged to Mrs Newsome, the widow of a wealthy manufacturer. She dispatches him on an errand to bring back her son Chadwick (Chad) who is living in Paris, so that he can take his place at the head of the family business. She also fears that he has fallen under someone’s bad influence, presumably a woman. Strether makes the journey, and on the way meets Miss Goostrey, a spirited American woman who has lived in Paris for years and offers to act as his ‘guide to Europe’. He discovers that Chad has improved and become more confident and sophisticated ... more >>

Philip Larkin's Jazz

2010-09-27T12:49:00.002+01:00

During the last decades of the twentieth century Philip Larkin was a sort of unofficial poet laureate – having turned down the offer of the real post on the death of John Betjeman. What many of his admirers didn’t realise at the time was that he wrote regular reviews of jazz recordings for The Daily Telegraph for a decade between 1961 and 1971 (later published as All What Jazz) and in fact as a youth harboured aspirations to become a drummer... more >>

Literary Criticism - a review

2010-09-20T17:04:00.004+01:00

Gary Day's main argument in this lengthy and impressive study is that literary criticism is like a pendulum that swings backwards and forwards in different historical epochs - at one moment emphasizing the text, and next its effect upon the reader. He traces all the main schools of literary criticism, starting with classical Greek and Roman writing on aesthetics, and he shows that many of the notions people imagine to be new have actually been around for two thousand years or more. This makes his book a good antidote to the mistaken idea that literary criticism began in the 1970s with the discovery of French structuralism ... more >>

Biro Magic

2010-09-17T17:41:00.000+01:00

Open Source Research

2010-09-07T11:38:00.007+01:00

why tax-funded research should be in the public domain

In the UK a traditional academic teaching post carried three requirements - teaching, research, and administration. Time and energy were normally allocated to these activities in either equal parts, or at least in that order of precedence. Good teachers gave lectures, conducted seminars and tutorials, looked after their allocation of students, and participated (however reluctantly) in departmental committees and faculty boards. That was in the past.

With the introduction of the (Labour) government's Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) all that changed. The emphasis of job descriptions morphed entirely into measurable research and tangible outcomes. We know the result: staff transferred as much teaching as possible onto poorly-paid and inexperienced part-time teachers - usually post-graduate students hoping the experience would give them some advantage in the greasy-pole process of seeking tenure.

It is now not uncommon to hear of staff packing any remaining teaching commitments into one term (or semester) - giving them two-thirds of a year free to do as they wish. At professorial level it's even worse. At my former university a well-known academic with an international reputation on a six-figure salary taught for two hours once a fortnight, refused to make his email address or his telephone number available to anyone, and lived outside the UK, jetting in for his celebrity seminars every two weeks and returning the same day.

Nice work if you can get it - all at taxpayers' expense. The only down side to this system so far at the academics are concerned is that they are under an obligation to write articles and books and get them published. Failure to do so usually means being punished with a heavier teaching load or even worse, with extra departmental duties.

So the system, if it is working properly, means that academic staff members investigate some self-chosen topic of interest in their discipline. They then write articles that are published in academic journals, and any book-length studies are produced by academic or commercial publishing houses. They are given the time to do this work, there is even a system of sabbatical leave (a term, semester, or year off work) and they are paid salaries throughout.

Notwithstanding the nature of such employment codes, the economics of this system warrant further scrutiny. In the case of academic journals it would appear that no money actually changes hands. Academics publish their work with no payment. They do so with the incentive of professional kudos and points added to their RAE ratings. But in fact the publisher charges university and college libraries an enormous amount for subscription to the journal. This is true even in the digital age when more and more publications fail to find their way into print. The recorded number of people who actually read these scholarly articles is truly microscopic. Figures between one and five readers per article are quite common. So the system is expensive and inefficient.

In the case of academic and commercial book publishers the system is a little more murky, but similar principles apply. Most in-house university presses are heavily subsidised, even if they claim to be economically independent of their parent-host. [They commonly do not have to factor in the cost of office and storage space, and maybe not even staff salaries.] Nevertheless, they produce worthy, non-popular works which are sold to an audience of college and university libraries at a huge cost.

Here is a case in point. I have recently reviewed a very good publication of this kind (many are far from good) - a collection of essays on literature and cultural history which retails at the handsome figure of one hundred and twenty pounds. That is more than twenty times the price of a popular classic, and way beyond the book-purchasing budget of most normal human beings.

The authors of this compilation may not be too worried about this state of affairs. They have their academic salaries, they will have received a small sum (or maybe even nothing) for their chapters. Their reward comes from enhanced academic status or an invitation to speak at a conference, the costs of which will be paid by their employer.

Commercial book publishers operate virtually the same system. A very small advance payment on future possible sales will be acceptable for an author whose wages are anyway being paid. If the book sells, the publisher profits far more than the author (who is not primarily motivated by sales income); and if it doesn't sell, it goes into the slush pile of remaindered titles along with all the many other unsold books. The author can still add this publication to the departmental RAE submission and go on to write more books that don't sell.

There are two things fundamentally wrong with this state of affairs. One is that public funding is being used and abused, the other is that the whole system of research, its publication and its consumption could be conducted far more efficiently (and at almost zero cost) by using the resources of the Internet.

It is now more than ten years since Steven Harnad published his Subversive Proposal that the results of academic research should be made available via a process of digital 'self-archiving' in the form of Web pages. He even thought through the process of peer approval, comments and corrections so that the final product was just as rigorously inspected as a traditional journal article. His main objective at the time was to overcome the terribly laborious process of academic print publishing that can result in delays of up to two years before an article sees light of day. But in fact the same arguments can be made to suggest that research funded by taxpayers money should automatically be put into the public domain. After all, if the public has paid for it, the results should be available to everybody.

Nobody would lose from such a system, and all interested parties would stand to gain in some way. The academic staff member writes a paper and publishes research findings onto a web site - maybe one established by the host university. The content of the paper goes through any peer appraisal and revision process, and then is put into immediate circulation and made available to the public - far more quickly than its print equivalent. The university keeps the public kudos of a 'contribution to knowledge'; the author is likely to have far more readers and more feedback; and the public has access to work that it has paid for.

Of course there may be special cases. Some science departments have financial partnerships with commercial and industrial companies which involve copyright, patents, and intellectual property rights issues. This is another example of taxpayers subsidising commercial interests, but these might reasonably be excluded from such schemes. But the vast majority of research is carried out in subjects with little or no commercial value at all. It lies unread, unloved, and ignored, buried far out of sight in departmental archives and library vaults.

There isn't even any reason why those with a saleable product shouldn't publish in print as well as digitally. If an article of a book-length study proves popular in its Web space, that is a compelling endorsement so far as print publishers are concerned. And the arguments regarding free online access versus for sale in print are now well known. Making something available free on line enhances the chance of people buying the same thing in printed format, especially in minority interest and specialist subjects.

So - just as any information gathered by a government should be made available free of charge to the public (population statistics, government spending figures, Ordnance Survey maps) the results of research conducted in publicly-funded universities should be available to the people who pay for it through their taxes. In fact whilst they're at it, I can't think of any reason why universities shouldn't publish their course syllabuses and teaching materials as well - can you?

The Blues - an introduction

2010-08-31T12:42:00.003+01:00

Most people imagine that 'the Blues' is a form of musical expression characterised by mournful lamentations about life's hardships or expressions of lost love . Ask any musician, and they will tell you that it's the name of a musical form, moving from the tonic to the sub-dominant fourth, then via a flattened seventh, back to the dominant. And a singer might point out that it is a four-bar 'call' or phrase that is repeated then completed by a four-bar 'answer'. Elijah Wald's strength is to show that it means all these things - and more besides. The blues also a thorough mixture of European and African American musical elements that first became popular via very politically incorrect minstrel shows in the early decades of the twentieth century... more >>

Midnight in the Century

2010-08-26T19:50:00.002+01:00

Victor Serge is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers of the twentieth century. He wrote under extremely difficult conditions, much of the time whilst living in exile - in his adopted homeland Russia, in France, and in Mexico. He frequently had to write in secret and he smuggled his work out of the Soviet Union to be published in France and Spain. His writing was banned throughout the communist period in Russia, and it has only been available there quite recently. His novels are presented in the form of self-contained chapters that sometimes appear to have very little connection with each other. Characters are developed, then suddenly seem to disappear, only to pop up again later in a different context. What Serge was doing was trying to capture the chaotic state of a world in political flux, and create representative figures rather than outstanding individuals - though in the end what he produced turned out to be not unlike the traditional European novel... more >>

Bullfighting latest - this is more like it!

2010-08-19T19:53:00.003+01:00

Modern Architecture: a review

2010-08-13T19:12:00.005+01:00

This is a scholarly history of modern architecture which has gone through a number of editions and has been kept up to date with obvious enthusiasm from the author, who is an authority on the subject. Peter Frampton starts with three short chapters that give the historical background to the modern era. That is, the architectural thinking, urban planning, and the technological developments after 1750 that led to the twentieth century, when modernism began ... more >>

Talking about Design

2010-08-10T13:46:00.002+01:00

John Berry is the former editor and publisher of U&lc (Upper and lower case) the prestigious and influential typographical journal, and he has won awards for his book designs. This is a collection of short articles on graphic design he wrote for the portal web site Creativepro.com. I first came across this book when it was announced that, in common with many other authors in the digital age, John Berry was giving the book away free of charge as a PDF download. I grabbed a copy, saw it was an attractive production, and immediately ordered a printed version from Amazon. By the time I had finished reading the first few chapters, I also ordered its sister production dot-font: Talking About Fonts.... more >>

The History of Copyright

2010-08-06T20:11:00.003+01:00

This is a collection of academic essays that seeks to establish legitimacy for a relatively new intellectual discipline - the study of the history of copyright. The editors in their introduction maintain that new academic disciplines arise when it generally becomes felt that there is need for them. It is certainly true that many of the technological advances of the last twenty years (in the digitization, reproduction, re-purposing, transmogrification, and distribution of various media) have brought issues of copyright, ownership, and intellectual property rights into sharp... more >>

Puzzle Sculpture

2010-08-02T13:33:00.004+01:00

This guy has a simple idea - and lots of skill. He makes interlocking puzzles out of metal. But the metals are beautifully shaped and coloured - so the finished product looks like a work of art. His web site is amazingly old-fashioned - but the products are wonderful. His latest also includs a working gun! Shame they're so expensive - but good luck to him

Virginia Woolf & the Arts

2010-08-01T12:29:00.005+01:00

As editor Maggie Humm points out in her introduction to this huge collection of scholarly studies, Virginia Woolf spent her entire life surrounded by creative people of all kinds. Her father was an internationally renowned writer (on belle lettres and moutaineering), her sister was a painter, and her friend Roger Fry both a critic and an artist. Virginia Woolf visited contemporary exhibitions, travelled to museums abroad, and participated in aesthetic debates via her prolific output of essays and ... more >>

Spain and Bullfighting

2010-07-28T20:38:00.005+01:00

I was very glad to note earlier today that the independent region of Catalonia has voted to ban bullfighting. This is a step into the twenty-first century which was long overdue - and one which I hope will be followed by the rest of the Iberian peninsula. And southern France as well, where it still goes on.

Anyone who has doubts about this issue should simply watch what actually happens at a bull fight - either at the bullring or on TV. You should ignore all the sentimental Ernest Hemingway guff and hyperbole about 'honour', 'respect', 'dignity', and so on.

The plain fact is that bullfighting is torturing an animal to death. Lots of men on horseback stick lances into the bull's back to weaken it. Then more men with harpoon-like devices stick more in, until the animal is weakened to the point of near death. Then a man in very tight trousers with a sword torments the animal for the pleasure of the crowd and to show how fearless he is. Finally he sticks the sword into the animal's spinal column - and not surprisingly, it dies.

Every now and again in this ritual execution, the animal gets a chance and gores one of its tormentors. At which point, I can't supress a cheer of encouragement.

Virginia Woolf and Emily

2010-07-26T23:51:00.004+01:00

I've just spent the first week of the summer recess in Andalucia with my grand-daughter - a tall and shapely young woman of twenty-five with forthright opinions and an unquenchable appetite for soft drinks of all kinds. Whilst we lounged reading in the garden under the palm trees my attention has been occupied by Virginia Woolf, one of my favourite writers who was not dissimilar in appearance. Actually, I have been reading what academic critics have to say about her.

The state of academic literary criticism is dire. Essays and articles are written with only one thing in mind - self-promotion. Fashionable critical attitudes vary from 'Queer' criticism to post-feminist feminism and post-deconstructionist balderdash. All of these schools have one thing in common: they are not interested in the literary source itself, but only what other critics have said.

Having spent a great part of my adult life trying to infuse a sense of critical enthusiasm for literature into generations of students, I find this sort of writing extremely depressing. It will do nothing to promote an appreciation or a taste for the subject. Fortunately, most of it will rightly be ignored by most common readers and forgotten by competitors in the academic rat race who will move on to something else more fashionable.

These occasions also give me the opportunity to immerse myself in music of my own choice. I subscribed to Spotify.com for that very reason. Type in the name of your selected artist or genre, and up comes a daysworth of listening, uninterrupted by adverts for the paltry sum of £4.99 a month - no matter where you are. I normally shower to Bill Frissel and dine to Tommy Flanagan, but tonight I have gone further back to the much under-rated Wardell Gray.

Tomorrow morning, I am going to miss Emily's comforting presence as she eats her toast whilst watching daytime TV.

Quiz Shock Horror!

2010-07-19T15:27:00.001+01:00

Unknown to me, my entire family have been doing the quiz tests I've recently created. Reaction has been, let's say 'vigorous' to put it mildly. They all complain that the questions are too difficult, or too esoteric. So I've upgraded several quizzes to GENIUS level - and created some some new easier questions, including this one on famous paintings. Let me know if you think it's in the wrong category.

Mantex Pub Quiz - goes on line!

2010-07-12T13:43:00.003+01:00

Do you know which country's national flag this is? Russia? Poland? Slovakia? No - all wrong. The answer is Albania. That's one of the questions in our new on line Pub Quiz. If you want to pit wits against yourself, we've got questions at four levels. Easy - Medium - Difficult - and Genius. No prizes - but satisfaction guaranteed. And your score is calculated automatically. Have fun!

The Writer who Couldn't Read

2010-06-24T16:58:00.004+01:00

During the thirty years or more that I have taught writing skills, one of the hardest concepts to get across to students is the idea that learning to speak a language and write a language are two different things. Here is a variation on that same thing - the case of a man who suddenly lost the ability to read, but who could still write. Fascinating stuff. I can see a chapter in Oliver Sacks next book already.

UPDATE: Blimey! On the same day that I posted this, the New Yorker comes out with exactly what I predicted. Read it here >>

Alexander Rodchenko - Russian Modernism

2010-06-24T16:22:00.003+01:00

Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) was one of the most influential artists who emerged from the explosion of Russian modernism which took place between 1915 and 1923. Initially working as a painter, he stipped bare the canvas and worked with ruler and compass to devise minimalist pictures which he described as 'subjectless'. But then given the opportunities presented by the early years of the revolution, he went on to become a designer in furniture and fabrics, ceramics, posters, typography, stage and film design, exhibition display, and radical innovations in photography. He was a central figure in the movement of Russian constructivism, a radical activist, a theorist, teacher, and a pioneer of photo-montage... more >>

Strangers on a Train

2010-06-20T12:36:00.004+01:00

Strangers on a Train was Patricia Highsmith's first novel. Published in 1950, it was quickly made into a film the following year by Alfred Hitchcock. The film become a classic, and it is this version which has become better known. Unless you are only twelve years old or have been living on Mars for the last few decades, you'll already know the basic plot outline. Two men meet on a train. Guy has an estranged wife standing in the way of his romance with a wealthy socialite, whilst Bruno has a rich father whom he hates because he refuses to give him an allowance. Bruno suggests to Guy that they 'exchange murders' - removing their respective obstacles to happiness. He argues that nobody will be able to assign motive, because the assailants are unknown to the victims, and nobody will have any reason to think that the two plotters knew each other, because they have never met before.

At first the two men appear to be polar opposites. Bruno is a spoiled emotional child, a psychopath, a drunk, and a failure. Guy on the other hand is a cultivated professional, a successful architect with a promising future. But as the novel progresses they slowly become more like each other ...

more >>

The History of the Typewriter

2010-06-16T18:48:00.003+01:00

What I found most amusing was not only the astonishing variety of models, but how he seems slightly bewildered by his own performance. Brilliant!

Bloomsday 16 June 2010

2010-06-16T18:02:00.004+01:00

I'm honoured to celebrate Bloomsday 16 June - the day of Ulysses and Joyce's first meeting with his wife Nora - by publishing a study guide to Dubliners. It's here

Modern Slang

2010-06-14T14:01:00.003+01:00

As the editors say in their introduction to this latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Slang, ‘A year, to paraphrase Harold Wilson, is a long time in slang’. In fact the principal difficulty in compiling lexical resources of this type is what to leave out – because a great deal of slang is very evanescent. Oxford University Press have the advantage of compiling their dictionaries from the huge ‘Corpus’ of recorded language use which makes up the data base from which their publications are compiled. This is a collection of examples of how the English language is actually being used, drawn from the printed word – from literary novels and specialist journals to everyday newspapers and magazines, and from Hansard to the language of chatrooms, emails, and weblogs. The database contains over two billion words, and expands at the rate of 350 million words a year ... more >>

Victor Serge: Literature and Revolution

2010-06-06T12:56:00.008+01:00

Marxists have always had a problem with theorising Art. Radical proposals for changing the State and replacing the power of one class with that of another does not sit easily with a taste for Beethoven, Michaelangelo, and Marcel Proust. And political sympathy for an oppressed class (the proletariat) has often resulted in wishing its artistic achievements into being. When a revolution (of sorts) did take place in St Petersburg in 1917, expectations were high that a different art would be formed in the new type of society. And at first it did start to happen. The graphic art of Rodchenko and El Lissitzsky, the architecture of Tatlin, and the poetry of Mayakovsky produced a native form of modernism whose influence is still alive today, almost 100 years later.

But none of these artists were working class, and before long Party apparatchiks were calling for the suppression of their work and demanding art that followed the Party line. Since the party had a monopoly of the means of production and even the supply of paper, they got what they called for. The result was worthless propaganda of the 'boy meets tractor' variety.

Victor Serge was able to avoid these ideological traps more than his contemporaries (and his predecessors) for two good reasons. ... more >>

Bike doping!?

2010-06-05T13:18:00.005+01:00

Oh dear! It always pays to be a bit cautious when getting excited about major triumphs and demonstrations of power in the world of professional cycling. I fell for the dope-fuelled displays of Floyd Landis in the 2006 Tour de France, then redeemed myself slightly by spotting as drug users both Michael Rasmussen in 2007 and Riccardo Ricco in 2008. But now it seems there is another form of cheating that will be more difficult to spot, and the chief suspect is - Fabien Cancellara, whose amazing win in the Paris-Roubaix is now being called into question because of possible ... er ...Bike Doping!

Language, Technology, and Society

2010-06-04T12:29:00.002+01:00

Most people think that writing and speaking a language are more or less the same thing - that writing is speech transcribed onto paper. The fact is that they are two different (though closely related) systems, and writing is an abstract system of symbols for representing the spoken language. There are some languages which are spoken but which have no written equivalents, and there are some languages (computer code for instance) which are never likely to be spoken. Richard Sproat, in this wide-ranging study, emphasises from the start that the most important connection between speech and the written language is the technological invention of writing. He takes the radical line that most written languages have built into them a strong element of encoding the sound of the language - including even Chinese, which many people imagine to be entirely ideographic... more >>

Charleston Saved 1979-1989

2010-05-29T15:50:00.001+01:00

Charleston is a farmhouse near Lewes, Sussex which was once the home of Clive Bell, his wife Vanessa, and her lover Duncan Grant. Leonard and Virginia Woolf were frequent visitors from their own country property at Monk's House in nearby Rodmell. Other members of the Bloomsbury Group such as Lytton Strachey, David Garnett, and Maynard Keynes were regular visitors. It is most famous for the fact that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant covered the entire surface of the house - walls, fireplace, cupboards, tables, chairs - with their decorations and paintings, an impulse that was also part of the Omega Workshops movement initiated by Roger Fry around the same time during the first world war. [A subsidiary purpose of the house was to act as a refuge for conscientious objectors to the war.]... more >>

Going up!

2010-05-26T11:13:00.004+01:00

I bought a bike yesterday to resume my cycling career after a fifty year lay off. Boy, am I out of condition. Just riding back from the shop was a major effort. And then I tuned in to watch the Giro d'Italia to see scenes like these - guys finishing off a lung-bursting mountain time trial up the side of a ski slope, with gradients of 25% on the home stretch. That's one in four in old money.

Writing Academic Books

2010-05-25T16:19:00.002+01:00

What exactly is a successful academic book? One which sells a lot of copies, or one which helps to promote your career? Most people would trade the first success for the long-term benefits of the second. Anthony Haynes starts his guide to scholarly authorship by considering the possible justifications for writing: financial, self-esteem, altruism, and even the desire to learn. But these are all rendered almost redundant by the current climate in the academic world. There is now an overwhelming requirement to publish - unless you want to end up in one of those mind-numbing departments of 'Maintaining Academic Standards' or 'Human Resources and Professional Development'... Writing Successful Academic Books >>

Giro d'Italia 2010

2010-05-20T21:10:00.003+01:00

There was a dramatic stage in the Giro yesterday when the race favourites allowed a huge breakaway to gain up to 19 minutes advantage - and then couldn't pull them back. The result was that riders who the day before had been wallowing half way down the general classification suddenly found themselves propelled into race contention once again. Bradley Wiggins went from twenty-fourth to tenth overall overnight. Follow the action on the excellent Steephill.tv which has streamed highlights minutes after each stage finishes.

David Gentleman: English Design

2010-05-17T19:04:00.013+01:00

David Gentleman is a very English artist and designer. He studied with Edward Bawden and John Nash at the Royal College of Art, London, and has established an international reputation from his work in engraving, lithographs, book illustration, posters, and a number of high-profile public design commissions. This monograph comes from a new series on individual designers published by the Antique Collectors Club. It's a beautifully designed and well illustrated portfolio of his work from the 1950s to the present, with ... David Gentleman: Design >>

Reading Week - May 2010

2010-05-16T19:13:00.002+01:00

Just as I make plans for another reading 'week' and assemble my literary fodder for survival in hot Andalucian sunshine - the bloody Icelandic volcano starts erupting again! Isn't it about time the wind started blowing in a different direction?

I will be returning to an old favourite, Victor Serge, whose Unforgiving Years I enjoyed so much on my last trip. I'm also looking forward to reading the original Patricia Highsmith novel of Strangers on a Train, the film adaptation of which I have seen several times, and a theatrical version of which I saw recently at the amateur Garrick theatre in my home town.

eBook Readers - comparison chart

2010-05-15T14:09:00.006+01:00

Kindle eBook Reader Main features: 6" diagonal E Ink® electronic paper display - weight 10 ounces (290 grams) - 1.5 GB storage - USB 2.0 port - supports multiple ebook formats - download via free built-in WiFi - 2 weeks battery life (reading) - holds up to 1,500 books - UK=£176 ... Comparison chart >>

Dorothy Bohm

2010-05-14T16:09:00.005+01:00

I wandered into Manchester City Art Gallery recently (just to get out of the rain) and was bowled over by an exhibition of photography by Dorothy Bohm - someone I had never heard of before. She was born in Konigsberg in East Prussia in 1924 and her family emigrated to Manchester in 1939 to escape the Nazis. A World Observed 1940 – 2010 is the first comprehensive retrospective of her work. It runs from 24 April to 30 August 2010, and traces her exceptional career across six decades and several continents. From the 1940s vintage portraits featured on this site, through jewel-like Polaroids from the 1980s to colourful images of contemporary life, the exhibition features over 200 original photographic prints.

You can explore a recreation of her 1940s Manchester portrait studio and (re)discover the fading art of film processing in a replica dark room. You can also see how her photographic style and interests have evolved over the years. Visit the gallery’s website to see some examples of her more recent photographs. There’s also a comprehensive catalogue being published to accompany the exhibition.

Singled Out

2010-05-13T18:44:00.005+01:00

Before the First World War a single woman was expected to have one aim in life - to get married. But three-quarters of a million British soldiers were killed in that war, leaving not enough men to go round for a generation of what became known as 'Surplus Women'. Virginia Nicholson is the author of the widely acclaimed Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939. This is her study which explores the extraordinary lives these 'left-over' women made for themselves. It tells how they challenged conventions, how they campaigned to better their lot, how they often coped with poverty, childlessness, and ... more >>

Digital Politics

2010-05-12T12:01:00.005+01:00

This week has been a momentous period in British politics. I'm glad I was on hand to watch it. But in fact I could have been anywhere - because I have followed events via online news services, bloggers, and in particular the live blog at Guardian.co.uk - which has outstripped even the regular political bloggers in gathering up to date information. It's a site that's updated every sixty seconds or so.

This illustrates two points. First, that the mainstream media has been forced to embrace blogging - after its initial sneering contempt for citizen based journalism. Second - that this competence doesn't come cheap. Despite the Guardian's excellent online presence , they make a loss of eight million pounds a MONTH. Kelvin Mackenzie famously called the Graun 'the worst newspaper in the world' (because it sold so few copies) - and there's still an element of truth in that when you consider the newspaper as a business enterprise. But then that seems to be true of all the daily broadsheets - which another blogger (Guido Fawkes) wittily described as 'vanity publishing'.

Lena Horne 1917-2010

2010-05-11T12:19:00.003+01:00

We lost Lena Horne at the weekend - but this sensational YouTube clip reminds us what a great performer she was. It also reinforces the notion that many great singers get better as their voices age - like good vintage wines. I've noticed that in Sarah Vaughn and Mel Torme too recently. This performance also illustrates the fact that great musicians articulate songs in a manner packed with sincerity. She sings 'Stormy Weather' as if she is living its sentiments.

UK Elections - Part II

2010-05-08T23:14:00.002+01:00

Another day, another stalemate.

The State of the Parties

2010-05-08T14:23:00.003+01:00

A picture that does not need a caption.

"Disaster" - the movie

2010-05-05T15:51:00.001+01:00

This excellent compilation ends with a plea I don't endorse - but it's worth watching anyway. Tomorrow I shall be voting tactically to register my democratic protest against what's shown in this film.

Think about your vote

2010-05-04T19:32:00.000+01:00

Lest We Forget

2010-05-03T18:19:00.003+01:00

Metropolis - restored

2010-05-01T13:56:00.004+01:00

There's a new version of Fritz Lang's classic silent movie. It features an extra 25 minutes of lost footage which was discovered in Argentina. You can see the trailer here - and DVD release is scheduled for November 2010.

Art Nouveau

2010-04-25T15:07:00.003+01:00

Alastair Duncan points out in his introduction to this beautifully illustrated study, that Art Nouveau was not a style but a movement which was a reaction against the stuffy over-decoration of the nineteenth century. It took its early inspiration from the work of William Morris, Arthur Mackmurdo, and Walter Crane, and fused these with an enthusiam for Chinoiserie and Japonisme. And as a movement it errupted very suddenly in the 1890s, spread throughout Europe and even top the USA – and then ended just as abruptly in the first decade of the new century.

It was known by a variety of names in different countries – Jugendstil in Germany, Art Nouveau in English-speaking countries, Stile Liberty in Italy (after the famous London store) Modernista in Spain, and Style Metro in France, after Guimard’s Underground ...more >>

Moodle Teaching Techniques

2010-04-18T17:07:00.002+01:00

As a course management system, Moodle has more technical features than its commercial rivals, but that’s not the only reason it’s being taken up by schools, universities, and colleges. In the jargon of educationalists, it’s a ‘constructivist’ program. This means that it allows users to learn through building their own experience of learning, possibly in contact with other students. It is student-oriented, rather than teacher-led, and it promotes learning through doing rather than just passive reception.

If anybody tells you it’s an easy software program to use, they’re lying. Most people will need all the help they can get, even if they are putting some ready-made course materials into Moodle’s default templates. That’s why books such as this guide to course creation exist – to explain the principles of eLearning design at the same time as offering a guided tour of some Moodle features .... more >>

Paris-Roubaix 2010

2010-04-13T19:41:00.004+01:00

Thank goodness for YouTube! Within a couple of hours of the race finish, I was watching video clips of Fabien Cancellara winning the one-day classic in grand style. This was a truly heroic effort. Imagine - attacking in a solo bid, with almost 50 Km still to go - and then taking two minutes out of the field!

The First Five Pages

2010-04-06T18:19:00.003+01:00

Noah Lukeman is a New York literary agent with a number of top-ranking authors as his clients. He has also written a number of books on the craft of writing (see The Art of Punctuation for instance) so he knows what he's talking about when it comes to the literary marketplace - in which it must be said so many people wish to make their mark. Publishers and literary agents receive hundreds and hundreds of manuscripts each month - almost all of which are rejected. It's the job of these publishing professionals to be discriminating, and it's the job of the writer to produce a manuscript that stands out among the competition. Those outstanding qualities, Lukeman argues, have to be apparent from the first five pages - otherwise no agent or publisher will bother reading further. In fact he claims - and I believe him - that five sentences is enough. ... more >>

Literary Mashups

2010-03-27T11:21:00.007Z

Penguin Books have started doing their version of Mashups. They take a classic text - which is out of copyright. That text would be available FREE as an eBook at Project Gutenberg. But they 'enrich' the text by adding introduction, notes, associated materials, filmography, and so on. Then they can justifiably claim that their version has 'added value', and offer it for sale. Their version of Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' contains

* How to Read Frankenstein
* Appendix IV: From Plato's Symposium
* Frankenstein Chronology
* Nineteenth-Century Reviews of Frankenstein
* Frankenstein Filmography
* Suggested Further Reading

Our versions of the classics contain plot summaries, character lists, video clips, critical commentary, further reading, and links to eBooks - and they're FREE.

Great Expectations
The Turn of the Screw
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Where Angels Fear to Tread
Ulysses
The Trial
To the Lighthouse

The Russian Experiment in Art 1863-1922

2010-03-26T19:09:00.005Z

[Following the marathon effort of getting my new web site live and kicking, I'm changing tack slightly in this blog format. Instead of posting full length articles and reviews, shorter pieces will appear more frequently.]

Camilla Gray was a young and pioneering scholar of Russian modernist art. She was a former ballet dancer, with no academic background. She married Oleg Prokoviev (the composer's son) and died tragically young at the age of only thirty-five. And yet she established a body of work on Russian art in 1962 which was quickly appreciated in other European countries. Her original impulse, fuelled by admiration for the modernist work of Malevich and Tatlin, was to look into the tradition out of which such revolutionary art had grown. There was little information around in the 1960s when she began her research, which is what makes her achievement so remarkable.

The first part of the cultural process she documents is the development of a Russian middle class in the late nineteenth century. Mamontov, who made his money builidng the railway from Archangel to Murmansk, established an artists' colony .