'Ode on a Grecian Urn' was my introduction to English Lit at undergraduate level, so I have a special small space set aside for Keats. Keats qualified as a doctor - he could have lived comfortably, but chose penury, savage criticism, and poetry. It famously affected his love life, and can't

Thanks to @hollowcrownfans.bsky.social “Ask yourself: is there anything in Antony and Cleopatra that makes us instinctively respect Marc Antony? Do we admire him? Do we identify with him? Do we feel, in our bones, that something truly great has fallen?” It’s #ShakespeareSunday.

I vividly remember reading this poem for the first time - sat in an office waiting for a teaching interview, it was a poster on the wall. It struck me as so beautiful, so poignant , that it completely distracted me from my nerves. It might seem incongruous to have Millay - celebrity poet, Pulitzer

Can you believe it's thirty years since 'Fight Club' was first published? It's said that Palahniuk was inspired by the reaction (or lack of one) at work when he turned up with facial bruising after having been beaten up. It's a graphic example of how society ignores individual pain. With his

Excitingly, we've got a 100th birthday to celebrate today, even if the brilliant author isn't with us to enjoy it. If you haven't read 'I Am Legend' (1954), you really should. It won't take long, but the story will stay with you. In some ways, vampires take a back seat - horror fans will easily

If all you're relying on are the (admittedly splendid) films, you're seriously underestimating Helen Fielding's writing. Way past the off-putting 'chick-lit' label, it's a smart, comic, but revealing snapshot of the tyranny of self-improvement, and the anxiety that can lie in the space between

“By the end of Act I, I’ve decided that Antonio and his crew are guilty of some real chutzpah in approaching Shylock, and I’ve no time for the collective ennui of the merchant classes. Their hubris deserves a tragic ending. What does Shylock deserve?” It's seven lightning-quick years since ...

We need more writers like Toni Morrison. I think she's a carefully moral writer, aware of the terrible power of words and thus a responsibility to use them mindfully. Her work is often unsparing, and bleak, and giving life and voice to character types erased by history. Which makes it all the

Why couldn't I be a bit more romantic for this weekend's #ShakespeareSunday theme? And what connects Caliban with Frankenstein's 'Creature'? A few musings on the theme, with a little help from Friedrich Nietzsche and Mary Shelley. @hollowcrownfans.bsky.social

Don't be fooled into thinking this is just a bit of clipart - it's actually a highly accurate representation of My Dearest Partner of Greatness and Me, with a gloriously appropriate quotation for Valentine's Day, too. 🤪 Likewise, it would be too easy to dismiss PG Wodehouse as a writer of frothy

Sherlock Holmes fans (and I am a big one) will possibly boast that he could solve a crime without leaving his room - in Tey's 'The Daughter of Time' (1951), Inspector Alan Grant solves one from his hospital bed, and across centuries! Perhaps what Richard III was really like is the ultimate cold

This weekend's #ShakespeareSunday theme: CHOCOLATE & MUSIC!

“The aim is to get them to start tasting Shakespeare, not just relying on me telling them it’s full of vitamins and minerals, and if they have to chew it a little, so be it …” Yes, it’s the usual hot mess of ingredients: men made of vegetables, Ferris Bueller, Frasier, Germaine Greer, plus the

It's too easy to mythologise Sylvia Plath - let's try to humanise her a bit on the anniversary of her death. I think this quotation nicely sums up some of the unanswerable tensions in her life: poet, rebel, genius, mother, wife, needy, aloof, and ambitious - all these labels tore her in different

I’ve added a new free resource to the Upstart English shop today: a two-page visual timeline of Sylvia Plath’s life, work, and historical context. It’s designed for A-Level students who want to see how chronology shapes meaning, rather than treating poems as floating in space (or biography as a

A little ironically for someone who married Marilyn Monroe perhaps, but Miller was someone who saw the tragedy in ordinary lives. Small but unwise choices can undo a person, and then there is the 'Mice and Men' notion of events, where 'little people' are smashed to pieces on the rocks of world

What have you done today which qualifies as 'activism'? When we think about it, OPPRESSION is rooted in a desire to make other people less happy than we are. As if that will cure some deep-seated need in us ... Alice Walker writes about JOY as a form of protest. Although her books

More revision. Same results. Mocks can be frustrating: they show students what went wrong but rarely explain how to improve. If you’re feeling unsure what to do next, you’re not alone. And, parents, it doesn’t mean your child “isn’t good at English”. I help students turn mock results into

This week's #ShakespeareSunday theme: LOVE. I wanted to do something different. So here's the first of many shocking moments in King Lear. Really imagine yourself in the scene, noticing the callous confidence of Goneril and Regan, Cordelia's thousand-yard stare as she tries to control her

Through his 'voyages extraordinaires', Jules Verne was one of my childhood friends, taking me to the moon, to the bottom of the sea, and of course around the world in just eighty days! He didn't just speculate about space, or deep sea travel: he also wrote about skyscrapers, electric cars

My favourite Dickens anecdote - sadly, a huge exaggeration of events - is that when the final instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop' (1841) was arriving by boat at New York docks, crowds jostled each other and shouted at the sailors hoping for spoilers about the ending. That much is true, but

"Obsession? Tick. Spite and deliberate cruelty? Tick. Performative ‘Love’, where actions speak louder than words in denying the truth of those deep, deep sighs and breathless declarations? Tick." Which book - not pictured - am I talking about? www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-w... And

Quick test: which book is my Christmas Eve read? Of course , it's this one - It's hard for me to describe how much I love it. Also, it's the basis for some very happy memories: one year, a group of us read it in a candle-lit school library to a small audience, over the period of a month. I think

“Love’s Labour’s Lost ought, in so many ways, to have been up my street: clever, often acerbic wordplay; feisty, smart women; knob gags a-plenty; and a steady stream of puns.  But it wasn’t.” buff.ly/BmU6w6Q People assume I’m some form of #Shakespeare fanboy, unquestioning in my love of every word

To celebrate her birthday, I recently wrote that Patricia Highsmith could be 'difficult'. Perhaps we see this in her 1952 novel, 'The Price of Salt'. It's a pretty caring piece of fiction when you consider how prudish society was back then. Highsmith wasn't a fan of rigid moral codes, or of labels,

Paul Auster had a remarkable personal tale to tell - he survived a lightning strike as a lad of about 12 (which sadly killed another boy). He often writes about how a missed opportunity, chance, or decision can change your life forever. I wonder how much his brush with the randomness and

It could so easily have been different ... with his pleasing tenor voice, James Joyce nearly followed a career in music instead of writing. Joyce might have spent most of his adult life living in Europe, but he never really left Ireland, not where it mattered. Ulysses (which incidentally was

"Stop for a second, and imagine the pain of feeling your hero's loss so keenly, and then being confronted with their apparition in the witching hour." This week's #ShakepeareSunday theme? Heroes. www.linkedin.com/pulse/shakes... @hollowcrownfans.bsky.social

It's 175 years ago since the remarkable Mary Shelley died. I'd say 'Frankenstein' (1818) is in my top 10 books of all time, and if you think you know the story but haven't read it, I can't recommend it enough. It isn't just exciting, and wonderfully gothic, but I think it's incredibly sad, too.

Too many revision resources confuse decoration with learning. They look impressive, but leave students no clearer, no surer, and no better equipped to write about the text. That’s not respect for literature, and it’s certainly not respect for the learner. My resources start from a different

Cowboys and sunsets? There's a lot more to Zane Grey than that (even though, admittedly, he wrote them very well) ... Grey was also a qualified dentist, and probably did as much as anyone else to popularise the kind of big-game 'sport fishing' we romantically associate with Ernest Hemingway.

Now I can’t stop humming the Bonnie Tyler song … 😡 #shakespearesunday #shakespeare

“Examiners do not award marks for memory. They award marks for analysis.” 
Smarter revision does the thinking BEFORE you enter the exam hall. I’m putting something together which does just that. And YOU can influence which texts I prioritise. www.linkedin.com/pulse/memori...

Robert Frost seems such a timeless poet, so I was surprised to learn that he had died during the 'Swinging Sixties'. I can't place him there, despite knowing that he read at President John F Kennedy's inauguration in 1961 (when he was 86). The 'folksy' image which still pervades is a facade.

If we judge people by the company they keep, WB Yeats was, well, weird! As a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, he rubbed shoulders with #WeirdFiction authors like Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood. Another notable member was the famous occultist, Aleister Crowley!

"The rhetorical rant becomes lyrical; indignation becomes inspiration." In the latest of my free long-form commentaries, I ask how autobiographical 'The Canonization' might have been. Is THIS what John Donne wished he'd said to his father-in-law before being imprisoned for

Are there any authors you'd like to be friends with, or feel you'd get on really well with? I think I'll nominate two: firstly, Stephen King. So many of his books contain 'afterwords' that between those and his superb non-fiction, 'On Writing' (2000), I feel like I know him. The other would be

One of the things I like most about Virginia Woolf's writing style is how she can fix on something ordinary, and turn it into something profound. Another is her control of commas! I've recently finished Mrs Dalloway, and it will definitely have as lasting impression on me: what a remarkable

This week's #ShakespeareSunday theme: Danger and Warnings. It goes with the territory that you are frequently asked 'What's #Shakespeare got to do with me?' I think this is one of my favourite lines to talk about when persuading people that the plays are 'relevant' (I'm not a fan of 'relatable').

Robert Burns was the first poet whose work I fell for. And what an interesting set of contradictions he was - the rebel who worked as a tax collector; the patriot who almost emigrated to Jamaica; the radical who was quickly adopted by the establishment as a national treasure. Happy Burns Night,

When was the last time you re-read a book, and how long should you leave it before going back to one you read? What can't you put down this week? What do you wish you'd never picked up? This week's selection features a re-read: rarer than a hot, sunny day in our lovely North Wales village! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Ursula K Le Guin was one of those writers who looked like they would go on forever - then, in the blink of an eye, it's nearly a decade since we lost her. Le Guin was a person with clear and pronounced DIS-likes. One was the tendency to classify her work as 'Science Fiction'. Another was of

National Orwell Day, today, is an opportune time to urge everyone to read (or re-read) 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'. It's never been more important. A few years ago I read Neal Postman's fantastically interesting text, 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' (1985), and became convinced that he had nailed it (if

Here's our second big literary birthday for today - one of my favourite authors. With others such as Wilkie Collins, Poe is credited with creating the detective story as we know it, with 'The Murders In The Rue Morgue' (1841). A few years ago, I compared it to the great Sherlock Holmes novel,

Patricia Highsmith is the first of two notable literary events today. The second? You'll have to tune in later ... Highsmith the person was interesting, unconventional, and often 'difficult' - even with her friends. She kept snails as pets (they also frequently feature in her works), and once

🍻 Even though I don't drink on school nights, #DryJanuary does feel like it's dragging a bit this year. With this in mind, I went a bit off-piste for this week's #ShakespeareSunday theme: CREATURES great and small. What can I say? I'm just missing a few decent hoppy ales and a good night out ...

My Dearest Partner of Greatness would suggest this is just one of the ways in which I'm like Pooh Bear ... 🥱 You might not know that AA Milne was a successful writer for a more adult audience before Winnie the Pooh came along. In fact, he disliked being labelled a children's writer. If you'd

Any votes out there for Anne as the best of the Brontë sisters? She was the youngest, and the first to die (and the only one not to reach 30). Further, Charlotte in particularly may not have favoured her work, but we overlook Anne at our peril. Her novels have a gritty realism about them

In this week's offering: The mysterious case of the Missing Book … a bloody, good read, by which I mean it was (very) good and bloody, too! And then there’s the book I’m less than half-way through, yet have fallen in love with,

Fantastic theme this weekend! #ShakespeareSunday #Shakespeare