Paul Weller at Ludlow Castle last night.

The laugh of the day comes from… Rachel Reeves!

This excellent 2009 radio drama reconstructs the impact on EM Forster of the tragic death of Ernest Mertz in 1909. Forster met Mertz just once over dinner, but that same evening Mertz returned alone to his flat & committed suicide. The drama is based on real events. www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8ea...

In case you didn’t know, Exeter uni, where I work, has announced a plan to make 25% of staff in my English department redundant. Left-over staff will do double the teaching while their research time will be shrunk to 1%. Meanwhile admissions for English at Exeter are HIGH, and on the rise this year

My brother painted me this portrait of (a portrait of) Virginia Woolf for passing my viva.

Happy Bloomsday!

I completed the minor corrections to my PhD thesis last week, & today I heard that I will be officially awarded my doctorate in 2 weeks' time. 🥳🎉

I’m going to miss these 4 books when I have to return them to my university library next week (because I've completed my doctorate). I’ve had them at home with uninterrupted access since I first took them out on loan 4.5 years ago.

The Gwen John retrospective at the National Museum, Cardiff - "Strange Beauties" - is well worth a visit. I recently read Alicia Foster's biog of John & it was fabulous to see in the flesh the paintings Forster discusses. John really captures the essence of her subjects. The exhibition ends 28 June.

Reading about Rosamund Pike telling off an audience member for texting during a play in London over the weekend. The article went on mention other similar cases: "Andrew Scott halted his "to be or not to be" soliloquy in Hamlet, a few years back, after someone started using a laptop." A laptop?!

Nice way to start the weekend - my review of Edward Mendelson’s The Inner Life of Mrs Dalloway is now available in The Modernist Review. modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/2026/05/29/b...

The 200 potential redundancies "include roles in admissions, student support and IT services." www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Doing a @joannechocolat.bsky.social this morning & working in the shed. Nearby, the birds are singing, the cows are mooing, the sheep are baaing… & I’m working on my thesis corrections.

Oscar Wilde on why art should never try to be popular. From The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).

It’s well known that Elizabeth Barrett-Browning lived at Wimpole Street, London before eloping to Florence, but she lived the first half of her life in Herefordshire - near to where I now live. The Ledbury Poetry Festival is hosting an EBB Walk in Ledbury July. www.ticketsource.com/ledburypoetr...

Some of the most welcome words I've heard this week: "I am delighted to report that after careful consideration we have decided that we would like to accept your article for publication with minor corrections."

Visited Henry James’ former home - Lamb House - in Rye today. EF Benson (Mapp & Lucia) also lived there after James.

So just what do you do after successfully completing your PhD viva on Virginia Woolf & EM Forster? Yes, that’s right, you walk from Charleston & across the South Downs to see the glorious murals painted by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Quentin Bell at Berwick Church.

So just what do you do after successfully completing your PhD viva on Virginia Woolf & EM Forster? Yes, that’s right, you take a short break in sunny Sussex to see the Hogarth Press exhibition at Charleston on Firle!

I successfully defended my thesis yesterday. I passed with minor corrections. My examiners were perceptive, probing, and very supportive, which helped make my viva an enjoyable experience. In hindsight, I would have answered some questions differently, but I guess that’s normal.

For my recent Visiting Fellowship at the Univ of Reading, I researched E. M. Forster’s publishing activities in the US btwn 1923-25 by investigating his correspondence with the Woolfs' Hogarth Press. I wrote this blog post about what I discovered. research.reading.ac.uk/centre-for-b...

In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the Holy Grail poem mentions “visions” of the grail & a quest in which Lancelot “leapt” from a boat onto “a rock” on which sits a tower. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse also features a “vision” (Lily Briscoe’s) & Mr Ramsey leaps from a boat onto the lighthouse rocks.

Homebaked hot cross buns.

Sherlock fans - three silent Sherlock films are coming to the BFI Player on 13 April. player.bfi.org.uk/subscription...

Just discovered that Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and E.M. Forster's edition of Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India (1779-1815) were published by the Hogarth Press on the same day: 14 May 1925.

A friend recently visited London's Sambourne House - former home of illustrator, Linley Sambourne. Also the home of Cecil Vyse from A Room with a View (1985). Comparing my friend's photo with a film still, I noticed that the room's pictures & ornaments in 1985 are sitting in the same place today!

Your favourite podcast? Choose one. Here’s mine: Waldy & Bendy’s Adventures in Art. podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/w...

Really looking forward to going to this exhibition next month at Charleston in Sussex. www.charleston.org.uk/exhibition/v...

Apparently, buying books by the metre is now a thing. (From the latest TLS.)

Paid a visit to the fabulous Costume Couture exhibition at London’s Fashion & Textile Museum yesterday. For EM Forster fans, they exhibited these costumes from Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View & Howards End, together with one of Peggy Ashcroft’s costumes from David Lean’s A Passage to India.

I'm in the archive this week (more on this later). In the meantime, it's interesting to hear that the archivists are getting more & more enquiries from the public asking if they can access a collection the archive doesn't actually hold. Turns out ChatGPT is to blame. It's still hallucinating, I see

Watching Stoppard’s Arcadia at the Old Vic tonight.

These evil mfs

EM Forster's modernist credentials received a huge boost in the US in May 1924, when his piece, "Eliza in Chains" appeared alongside Mann's "Death in Venice" & a short essay on Matisse in The Dial magazine. It was published just weeks before the Aug 1924 release of A Passage to India in the US.

I'd like to give a paper at the MLA Convention in LA in Jan 2027. Trouble is, I'll have graduated with a PhD by then, so I'll be ineligible to apply for funding through my university. Do you know of any funding bodies who fund trips like this? (Note: I won't be eligible for MLA assistance.)

TS Eliot on academia: “I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls . . . Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead." Eliot to Conrad Aiken, 31/12/1914.

This anecdote by Brian Fagan about EM Forster made me laugh this morning. (Fagan took over Edward Arnold's publishing house when Arnold retired in 1930.) The passage is from "Aspects of E.M. Forster" (1969).

"A 2022 study showed that the proportion of working-class actors, musicians and writers has halved since the 1970s; another in 2024 found that fewer than one in 10 arts workers in the UK had working-class roots." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

And then my heart with pleasure… pops, And dances with the… snowdrops.

Yesterday, I received the fabulous news that I've been awarded a fellowship by the @cbcp-unirdg.bsky.social. I'll get funding to research correspondence related to EM Forster's efforts to get published in the US in the 1920s. A month in the archives. What's not to like?

Author Andrew Miller on EM Forster. More at www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...

I'm reading Kelsky's The Professor Is In. One chapter is on good & bad PhD s'visors. A good one will criticise yet also teach you. So true. In my 1st yr, my PhD s'visors pulled apart a chapter I'd written. I was taken aback, but they showed me how I could improve it. It was the wake-up call I needed

Caught the Wayne Thiebaud exhibition at the Courtauld before it closes on Sun. These stunning paintings display the richness & seductiveness of 1950s-60s America, but also a sense of underlying loneliness & isolation.

Caught the Showtime! exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum before it closes on Sun. Some fascinating material on display such as Dickens’s reading copies for The Story of Little Dombey, original posters of theatrical productions Dickens acted in, & the programme for Bart’s Oliver! from 1960.

There are some amazing objects on display at the @themerl.bsky.social’s James Joyce exhibition: a telegram from Beckett, a portrait by Wyndham Lewis, Joyce’s anniversary gift to Nora (a necklace) - but my personal favourite is a letter to Joyce from his daughter, Lucia, asking if she can go to Davos

The CfP for CBCP's 4th PG Symposium is out now. It will take place at Reading U on 19th May & the theme is "how archives can be used to reconstruct agency & cultural transmission in book & print cultures." Deadline for abstracts is 23rd Feb. More info👇 research.reading.ac.uk/centre-for-b...

I’ve spent the past few days collating evidence & making a case for a fellowship application to research two works by EM Forster from the 1920s. Wish me luck! A big thank you to @forster1970.bsky.social for his help with confirming the current gaps in EMF scholarship.

"The civilisation of the book has given way to the civilisation of the screen. English [...] is, “not dying, it’s dead” - an incidental [...] drive-by casualty of the Californian billionaires’ imperial campaign to annex our attention for their profit." jmarriott.substack.com/p/the-death-...

If you were to recommend a book or books to a humanities PhD student on: 1) finding their first lectureship in academia (a long shot, I know), and/or 2) moving into a postdoc role which one(s) would they be? Asking for a friend