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Children, Charity and Magazines
Read more: Children, Charity and MagazinesA Q&A with the author of Philanthropy in Children’s Periodicals, 1840–1930: The Charitable Child.
War Damage: Four Poets of the First World War
“what are the implications of [war damage] for our understanding of literary works which themselves engage with the theme of the damage inflicted by war?” Richard Price answers this as he considers how poets Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas…
The Football Pitch, England and the First World War
At the start of September 1914, less than a month after the outbreak of the First World War, the Football Association (FA), issued a mandate stating that clubs should offer up their fields ‘for use as Drill Grounds’. In an…
Doing History in the Digital World
Historians have used printed media such as books, letters, diaries, newspapers and magazines for centuries, yet now that the web has/is replacing that, the web is tomorrow’s historical resource. Relationships between historical ‘text’ sources, data and interpretation, the construction of…
Brendan Behan – A bit of a writer
Before his tragic death by self-destructive alcoholism at age 41, Brendan Behan was a celebrated Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, and playwright who wrote in both English and Irish. Fifty years since his death, a special issue of Irish…
Percy Bysshe Shelley and the British National Anthem
By Alison Morgan ‘A New National Anthem’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley is probably one of his least known poems. Written in 1820, in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre, Shelley’s poem is a paean to the female queen Liberty rather…
Literary Celebrity
Celebrity, publicity and authorship are common place in the 21st century and increasingly, authors are energetic in conveying their own celebrity rather than it simply being thrust upon them; it could be said there is an intimacy between authors and…
A taxidermist’s working life in the 19th Century
An April article in Archives of natural history gives a fascinating insight into the life of Charles Francis Adams, a young American who prepared, stuffed and mounted the skins of birds and mammals for display. It also details the early…
Leonardo Da Vinci and Samuel Beckett – implausible bed fellows?
An Italian Renaissance polymath, most known for his notebooks and paintings, Leonardo Da Vinci is still widely considered an enigma. His birthday was today, April 15th. A recent article in Journal of Beckett Studies (Volume 22.2) wonders how much Beckett’s…