The Centre for Book Cultures and Publishing's autumn events schedule is now live 📚 All welcome, events are free - join us. research.reading.ac.uk/centre-for-b...

Abstract Submission Deadline: 20 December 2025 For the call for papers and further details, please see the conference website: www.bilgi.edu.tr/en/academic/...

Simon Goldhill discusses his book, Queer Cambridge, in this clip. He comments on AC Benson, Forster, Goldie Dickinson, Turing & others. Many of whom lived on H Staircase. A time, Goldhill says, when Cambridge showed us “how to live with difference in the world.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UEy...

It seems to me more & more clear that the only honest people are artists, & that these social reformers & philanthropists harbour so many discreditable desires under the disguise of loving their kind, that in the end there's more to find fault with in them than in us. Virginia Woolf, D1, p. 293.

Apple & blackberry clafoutis. Nothing really special about that, except that I baked it this afternoon using apples from an apple tree in our garden & blackberries picked from the hedgerows near our home. Never done that before. It tasted delicious. Reckon I’ll have a go at Bake Off next year 😜

The BBC's 2014 Secret Life of Books episode on Mrs Dalloway is currently available on iPlayer. Presented by Alexandra Harris. www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

This is a new documentary about what librarians in the US are going through right now as they unite to combat book banning. It's due for release in UK cinemas on 26 Sept. I don't know when it'll be streamed. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ykll...

I recently read Francesca Wade’s new biog of Gertrude Stein as well as Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B Toklas - both of which I thoroughly enjoyed. My Stein journey is set to continue with this👇 A book which some (incl Stein!) consider her masterpiece.

Anyone use AI detectors? I tested gptzero.me, Originality.ai & gowinston.ai today & concluded that I can't trust them at all e.g. I uploaded an essay I wrote in *2016* & one of them (I won't say which one) said it was 99% sure is was AI-generated. Then I read this: arstechnica.com/information-...

Love this 3 minute talk by poet & U of Reading PhD student, Vic Pickup, on her research into Mills & Boon. She packs so much into just 180 seconds, & will possibly change any negative views or opinions you may have about M&B. youtu.be/qzFDFZqTLNE?...

Very sad to see Melvyn Bragg leave In Our Time after 26 yrs. The breadth & range of subjects he’s covered in that time is mind-boggling. But who’ll be the next In Our Time presenter? Shahidha Bari? Tom Sutcliffe? Samira Ahmed? Matthew Sweet? Ekow Eshun? Anne McElvoy? Anyone else?

Love this anecdote from Edward Mendelson’s new book, The Inner Life of Mrs Dalloway. It explains why, as a lecturer, he didn’t dwell on Virginia Woolf’s breakdowns.

And so begins the double-checking of all 660 thesis footnotes. 😵‍💫

New clip on Virginia Woolf & Charleston - to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the pub'n of Mrs Dalloway. Presented by Dr Darren Clarke, Head of Collections, Research & Exhibitions at Charleston. Wonder why VW wrote a £10 Midland Bank cheque to Quentin Bell in 1938? www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElsX...

Also, if you are Reading-adjacent on 23rd September, I'll be talking about the edition at @buxiduan.bsky.social & @lawrentian.bsky.social's symposium on modernist editing alongside @greenbowlerhat.bsky.social, @wvmierlo.bsky.social and many more bsky.app/profile/gree...

Buxi Duan @buxiduan.bsky.social has organised a wonderful symposium on Modernist Editing at the University of Reading. Do come! There are a few bursaries for PGR and precarious ECRs … research.reading.ac.uk/centre-for-b... @modernistudies.bsky.social

Sunbathing.

One thing I love about the end of summer is picking wild blackberries from hedgerows. Nice haul today.

Finished the 1st draft of my PhD thesis. 660 footnotes. Just 6 more & it'll be a Beast.

Bank holiday Mon. In the shed. Editing. (Shediting?)

Scholars have linked the use of “Rumpelmayer’s” in the opening of VWs Mrs Dalloway to the old Rumpelmayer’s cafe in Paris - a cafe popular with expats. What I didn’t know was that possibly the last photo of Gertrude Stein was taken there in 1946 (extracts from Mrs Dalloway & Wade’s new Stein biog).

Whenever we take our dog, Bonnie, out in the car, she gets so excited that she runs around & around it.

I’m at King’s College Archives looking at EM Forster’s papers. In a small notebook, he lists the books he read in 1908, & they incl. Maurice Guest (1908) by the Australian writer, Henry Handel Richardson. I wonder if this influenced the name for Forster’s Maurice - which he started writing in 1913?

The Ronald Blythe Fellowship is John Clare Society's new scheme awarding a PhD student focusing on Clare a £1000 bursary to support their work. Please pass on - &/or contact me or Honorary Secretary of the Society, Karen Lakey, for further information: johnclaresociety.wordpress.com/contact-us/

When I read a paper or listen to a talk which uses words like "underscores", "explores", "shaped", &/or uses the rule of 3, my internal AI detector kicks in & I wonder if the rest of it has been written by the likes of ChatGPT. Use a web-based AI detector? Their responses can be all over the place.

New children’s book on Virginia Woolf. She lived in “one of the nicest neighbourhoods in London.” It was so nice, kids, that she couldn’t wait to leave.

My knowledge of Gertrude Stein is limited to few biographical facts & a handful of poems, so this summer seemed a good opportunity to read about her life & explore her work.

Do we need yet another adaptation of Pride & Prejudice? TV execs seem to think Austen only published one novel in her lifetime. There are others, you know. Same with Dickens. How many adaptations of Great Expectations do we need? He also published more than one novel. www.netflix.com/tudum/articl...

As I enter the final stretch of my PhD journey, I've been been thinking about some of the things I wish I’d known before I started. Here’s eight I can remember...

Woolfians: if you have a copy of the SP Books ed of the Mrs Dalloway MS can you tell me how VW corrected "submit" in this passage - Notebook 3, p.98. Wussow says VW crossed out submit then added it in again. But my subpar notes from the BL say *an illegible word* was crossed out & "submit" was added

Hive mind: do you know of any interwar modernist novels or poems written by women which feature lower-middle-class protagonists/speakers or prominent lower-middle-class characters? Along the lines of Septimus Smith in Woolf's Mrs Dalloway & Charles Tansley in To the Lighthouse.

Job cuts, growing class sizes and crippling workloads appear to be changing the relationship between academics and their students, with fears that lecturers know next to nothing about those taking their classes, reports @julietterowsell.bsky.social #academicsky #edusky

DH Lawrence scholars: have any manuscripts and/or typescripts and/or proofs for The Rainbow survived? If so, where are they held, & to what extent are they complete?

The 35th Int'l Conf on Virginia Woolf is going ahead next summer! In Istanbul. Yay! Theme is "Woolf & Sound", which is funny bc I was alerted to this recording of the old BM Reading Room just this morning: sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/search?q=070.... A room VW discusses in A Room of One's Own.

In the words of Frances Partridge, Forster took pains to dress "like 'the man in the street', in impossibly dull grey suits, a woolly waistcoat perhaps and a cloth cap." (from Joseph Bristow's "Fratrum Societati: Forster’s Apostolic Dedications", 1997)

Terrible AI rendition of EM Forster from bestaudiobooksforfree.com/views/Books/...

Wrote the cover page for my thesis the other day. I collated all of the separate Word docs containing my chapters into one doc, so I thought I may as well create a cover page too. My title may change btwn now & my submission date, but this doctorate thing is suddenly becoming very real...

We’re on holiday in Scotland for 2 weeks. I think we have enough books to keep us going…

This afternoon’s Jamesian, Joycean, & Lawrentian book haul from a second-hand bookshop in Innerleithen in the Scottish Borders. All for £14.

Bonnie’s Scotland. Our cocker, Bonnie, at Scott’s View near the Dryburgh Abbey ruin in the Scottish Borders.

Finished Buddenbrooks (1901) today. A wonderful novel that resonates into our own times, esp the theme of commerce v arts. Little Hanno’s musical talent gets crushed beneath a system which values business acumen & careerism. And “middle class instincts” prevent any questioning of self or tradition.

Virginia Woolf & Football: in a selection of cuttings Woolf used to research Three Guineas (1938), is one from 1936. It has the headline, "GIRLS FOOTBALL IS JUST TOO POPULAR." Women's football was so popular that Northants Football Assoc would ban it because men's clubs suffered a "lack of support".

Dreamt I was at a Woolf conf last night & delegates had to complete a Super Mario-like task before they could from one panel to the next - collecting power stars & coins, jumping obstacles, breaking blocks etc. A great idea for the Woolf conf in Oslo in 2027, I reckon.

University Challenge returns tonight at 8.30pm on BBC2. It never fails to surprise me how soon UC returns to our screens. I'm still recovering from last season's exciting final in May. One of the best ever.

‪Anyone know if/when this new PBS doco on Hannah Arendt will be available in the UK? When I go to the PBS website to try & watch it, I get this message: "We're sorry, but this video is not available." It aired on 27 June in the US. www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aZb...

Some photos from my visit to Charleston last Monday.

Mitchell Alcrim at Literature Cambridge has written a glowing review of Mark Hussey's Mrs Dalloway: Biography of a Novel. He sees it as "an essential contribution to Woolf studies." www.literaturecambridge.co.uk/news/review-...

Yesterday at the Woolf conf, we discussed reading Mrs Dalloway. It reminded me of the time I read Bennett, Wells & Galsworthy novels back-to-back. I enjoyed them all - esp New Grub St. Then I picked up Mrs Dalloway. I kept putting it down as the writing was something else entirely. Transcendent.

Vanessa's Bell's oil on canvas painting of Charleston from c1950. On her first visit there in 1916, she wrote, "It was quite quiet & one is overcome by the extraordinary peace & beauty of the place. The colour is too amazing now, all very warm."

Dropped in to see the Vanessa Bell exhibition at Charleston in Lewes this afternoon. 136 works are on display - the largest ever for a Bell exhibition.