When the phrase ‘famous women’ is typed into Google some familiar faces meet your eye: Princess Diana, Elizabeth I and shockingly – Jennifer Aniston. Out of thousands of years of history, are these t...

Back in the day – the early twentieth century, to be precise – you couldn’t have fame and celebrity without the written word. Newspaper stories created windows through which notorious figures co...

Most colleges bare a concrete scar. It sits protruding, unsympathetic to its surroundings. Yours may look like a car park, a prison, or, in the words of Bill Bryson, “a toaster with windows”, but it’l...

"Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred"



These lines from Tennyson’s poem ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ memorialises the British soldiers w...

Name a few famous female authors. Austen, obviously. Plath, perhaps. Woolf, on a bad day. But there will be one great name that you will have forgotten. The name of an authoress outsold only by the Bi...

A few heads turn as Ali Smith wanders through the door of a sleepy west London cafe. It doesn’t surprise me given the sparkling success of her work so far; this unprecedented popularity has seen her b...

'Never write a limerick again.' This is the advice one friend gives to me following the ignominious collapse of the blog I'd been keeping through most of April, America's National Poetry Month. (For s...

Prior to writing the novel Emma, Jane Austen wrote of her eponymous protagonist that ‘I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like’. Oh, how this truth rings through time. Aspiri...

I’m fond of illustrative experiments, and decided to carry one out while at home last weekend. ‘All right,’ I said, having doled out paper and pencils to a reluctant sister and parental units. ‘Draw m...

So let’s start with the basics - my favourite novel is Jude the Obscure, probably because I first read it when I was applying to Oxford, aka “Christminster”. What is your favourite novel and, more imp...