Over the years I have published more than thirty essays in what are chiefly academic journals.
An essay of mine on 'D. H. Lawrence and snobbery' appeared in the October 2017 number of
Essays in Criticism, and one on 'T. S. Eliot and
modernism' in the March 2018 number of the
Cambridge Quarterly where I argue that a number of ideas put forward by Eliot in the 1920s, and
enthusiastically endorsed by the avant-garde critics of the day, do not in fact hold water and that it is only because he wrote great poetry
that they have since been taken so seriously, and had such a catastrophic effect on our culture. Accepted by the editor of
Essays in
Criticism, but long delayed by the pandemic, is my essay about Launce in
Two Gentlemen of Verona as Britain’s first stand-up comic, and
the scandalous way he was mis-represented in that deservedly popular film of some years ago,
Shakespeare in Love.
Of my dozen or so contributions to edited collections I like to remember an essay that appeared in D. H. Lawrence in
Italy and England, edited by George Donaldson and Mara Kalnins, because it describes how, in faithfully following in the
footsteps of Lawrence, I was robbed in a manner almost identical to his own description in Aaron's Rod of how he lost his wallet.
It was called 'Lawrence, Florence and Theft: Petites misères of biographical enquiry'.
Much more recently, I wrote a piece on F. R. Leavis's dealings with Lawrence for Andrew Harrison's Lawrence in Context (CUP, 2018), and
another on 'Stendhal, Byron and the Bourbons' for the second volume of a History of the European Restorations, edited by Michael Broers,
Ambrogio A. Caini and Stephen Bann (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).
