by eleanorh | Dec 15, 2020 | Uncategorized
Marion Thain’s blog is about “public questions of English cultural identities”: she asks if we, as a discipline (named, after all, for a national identity) “have a particular opportunity to contribute, collectively, distinctive resources and expertise to this debate”?...
by eleanorh | Nov 23, 2020 | Uncategorized
In my early teens a friend of my father’s, a GP and historian manqué, lent me a copy of Hans Zissner’s Rats, Lice and History and got me hooked on plagues. They are terrifying, of course, because, whatever refuges we construct for ourselves from common sense,...
by eleanorh | Nov 12, 2020 | Uncategorized
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to list a few of my favourite things. No, not raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles, nor even warm woollen mittens. Brown paper packages tied up with strings come close to the mark, although the packages were...
by eleanorh | Oct 30, 2020 | Uncategorized
This piece was originally published on the University of Reading’s Special Collections blog. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, I thought I would have to place my PhD research on hold. The stakes for me were high: only a few months before in October 2019 I had...
by eleanorh | Oct 26, 2020 | Uncategorized
In the academic year of 1982/83, students and lecturers of evening and day-time literature classes – organized by what was then the University of London’s Extra-Mural Department – founded a Literature Association which they...
by eleanorh | Oct 19, 2020 | Uncategorized
The coronavirus crisis has ushered in its own language. Covid-secure, social distancing, the R rate. These phrases have now become familiar. Some of this language is new but Covid-19 has also revived older words. Chancellor Rishi Sunak referred to ‘furlough’...
