Wondering about the date of the above photo, which was forwarded to me by my mother, Merryl (herself born in 1941): ‘The lady sitting with a baby on her lap is my grandmother’s mother: Gwenllian Phillips, née Bevan, of Trebryn. She is surrounded by some of her 14 children. Her…

Tolkien scholars are divided on the likelihood that Tolkien actually read the Denham Tracts, a group of pamphlets published between 1846 and 1859 by Yorkshire tradesman and folklorist Michael Aislabie Denham, afterwards republished as one book. He might have done, and in doing so might have come across the word…

In a paper he read before a meeting of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in July 1889, Morris defined romance as ‘the capacity for a true conception of history, a power of making the past part of the present.’ [May Morris, William Morris: Writer, Artist, Socialist (Oxford…

The ferry docks tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Look through the windshield: starlit is the night-air! Only, from the long line of cars Where halt holds lorries…

Our man, of course, was not born until 1812. Who’s this, then, in 1806? Well, he’s a character from this diverting novel (fourth edition 1806, so first edition probably a year or so earlier, but I can’t seem to trace that).

Here’s an 8-line poem by Vincent Bourne about a cat. Bourne was a moderately successful English neo-Latin poet of the 18th-century (there’s not much known about his life), whose popularity sparked somewhat during the Romantic period. Charles Lamb translated eight of Bourne’s Latin poems into English, and recommended him to…

The Google Books scan-in of John Latham’s General Synopsis of Birds (1801) gives us the text accurately, but has done something rather splendid to the coloured illustrations of the actual birds that interleave the volume. Something to do with the scanner misreading and flattening the colours, and blocking chunks of the plates, gives us these splendid, stylised rouge-et-noir images. A kind of Modernism ahead of time. Lovely! All hail Google Books.

From the vantage point of 2023 the end of the British Empire seems an inevitability, a good and necessary thing. The surprise, perhaps, is that it took as long as it did to happen. By 1960, when Macmillan delivered his ‘Winds of Change’ speech in South Africa, the process was…

Here’s another of Buchanan’s poems from Sylvae (1567) — for the meaning of the collection title ‘Sylvae’, see here — to add to my versions of Sylvae 2, Sylvae 3 and the immense Sylvae 4. This, you’ll be pleased to hear, is much shorter: a sixteen line poem in praise…