I have not done much in this relatively new formant which I like to think of as the equivalent of the short poems Lawrence wrote when he was too ill and tired to do anything else ('Pansies' he called them because that English word is derived from Pensées). Not that standard he set would be easy to reach! Some of these blogs have been posted on the website of Wordsworth Classics and others were written with members of the D. H. Lawrence Society in mind. But mainly they are for anyone who has happened to wander in my direction. They are not all about literature. One that is relatively recent, for example, deals with the problem of money in sport and is called
'Local heroes' (see under 'Musings') . In 'Texts for our Times' there is a blog with the self-explanatory title
'Boris, Byron and the 2019 general election' and another that considers the relevance of Defoe's
Journal of the Plague Year to our condition today (in 2020).
David Ellis Blogs
June 16th, 2025
Dickens’s sixth novel is remarkable for many things. Prominent in it, for example, is the astonishing fertility and invention of Mr Pecksniff whose holier-than-thou eloquence never fails even when his sordid self-interest is being publicly denounced.
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June 16th, 2025
The Elizabethans were fond of making a distinction between an `artificial’ fool — a professional comedian who assumed certain mental peculiarities in order to make people laugh, and what they called a `natural’. Shakespeare is
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