Society Blog

By Paul Skinner Glancing at any recent headline, it may come as no surprise that some of us are willingly absorbed in another year entirely, precisely a hundred years back. In publication terms, 1925 might not astonish as did 1922, so often termed the ‘annus mirabilis’ of Anglo-American modernism th…

By Andrew Gustar In the first part of this post, I discovered that Branshaw Teleragh – location of Edward and Leonora Ashburnham’s house in Ford’s The Good Soldier – was based on a misprint on a map of the New Forest, an area that Ford visited several times between 1902 and 1913. The nearest large h…

By Andrew Gustar In the early 1800s, a message could be sent between Plymouth and London in a matter of minutes. The Admiralty Shutter Telegraph, devised by Lord George Murray during the Napoleonic Wars, consisted of a series of hilltop signalling stations, each manned by a naval officer and two rat…

By Sara Haslam August 1893: The Questions at the Well by Fenil Haig [the first of many pseudonyms Ford used] was published by Digby, Long & Co., dedicated to Miss Elsie Martindale. Aside from the number of Elsie Martindale’s typed and handwritten story manuscripts, and the books of For…

I am 51 years old. I am not an academic. But I have remained a literary buff all these years. When I was a starry eyed young man of 19, I read War and Peace. After high school my intellect blossomed a bit. And I did not just read it because I was under the academic…