Planes, Trains and Plantagenets - Travel, history, Shakespeare and dri...

Last weekend I went to a cottage in Somerset with two friends in my writing group. We met two years ago, when we all took a non-fiction writing short course at City University (it’s taught by Peter Forbes and is excellent), and one of us who is much...

I think a lot about this post by Mary Beard, about how important it is to go back to primary sources, and a good thing as my first piece of proper graduate work turned up a solid first-hand example!
I was writing a paper looking at 15th-century versions of Judith, the biblical-apocryphal heroine who saved Israel by duping the enemy general Holofernes and cutting off his head. In France, Judith became connected with Joan of Arc, in the theme of sword...

Being a university student at 31 is extremely different from being a university student at 21, and by “different” I mean “much, much better”. For one thing, I occasionally have money. For another, I have friends who aren’t uni friends (the people on...

Thanks to Twitter conversation with Hailey Bachrach and this post by Holger Syme for helping me clarify thinking about CONCEPT
The best production I’ve ever seen of The Two Gentlemen of Verona was set in Amish country (Oregon Shakespeare Festival, 2006, dir. Bill Rauch). Verona was a Mennonite community, Milan was a swish Stepford-in-Brooks-Brothers villa, and in Act 5 a rave...