Haven't been south of the River for a while:

Last remaining galleried inn in London: the George Inn Southwark.

Nice image on geograph.org.uk with particularly good view of the galleries.

While you could dine at the George, it doesn't seem to gain massive plaudits for the cuisine, and you are very handy for Borough Market.

***

And in other London ( Read more... )

If we see fanfic as "the reworking of another author's characters" then this form really only appears for the first time in history with the invention of legal authorship in the 18th century through copyright and intellectual property laws, after the invention of the printing press.

Er.

Greek drama? (a lot of which probably counts as 'Homer fanfic ( Read more... )

This article was amended on 26 February 2012. The original referred to Christopher Marlowe as the writer of The Duchess of Malfi. This has been corrected.

After reading the print version, which has 'Marlowe' in the headline and several times in the text, I was going 'I know there's a lot of revisionism going on around the authorship of Jacobean ( Read more... )

I've been chewing over some thoughts on genre since reading this post by
( Read more... )

Lucy Mangan: Isn't reading, like, really, really great?:
This is intended as no slur upon [Hay] festival... It is one of those entities that, even if it's not really your thing, you are still happier for knowing it exists - like Wiltshire, perhaps, or Uncle Joe's mint balls. It is simply because books and reading are to me such a fiercely private ( Read more... )

Some works are forgotten because lost in the mists of oblivion really is the best place for them.

To the White Bear pub theatre in Kennington this evening to see Westward Ho, a work by Thomas Dekker and John Webster (so not the collaborative dreamteam made in heaven), which has not had a London production for 400 years.

And while I have seen some ( Read more... )

Just back from watching a production by Fallen Angel Theatre Company of Fletcher and Massinger's The Custom of the Country at the White Bear pub theatre in Kennington.

Very enjoyable and well done.

Very much the sense that the authors were having a lot of fun with various existing tropes of Jacobean drama and riffs on them: there are several ' ( Read more... )

Coming around again - nothing new under the sun - perpetual cycles: the intensity of concern we have now about childhood, and the remedies and solutions we propose, have a remarkable similarity to those in play at the beginning of the 20th century.

Josephine Butler gets her due - I don't think of her as forgotten, and I think that side of it can be ( Read more... )

From today's Guardian:

Laurence Norfolk likes Judith Flanders' Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain.

Kathryn Hughes on new group biography of the Impressionists, and useful meditations on this genre:
Group biographies are popular at the moment for a variety of reasons. For one thing they get around the dreary insistence ( Read more... )

Saw a rare production of this Jacobean play at the White Bear pub theatre in Kennington. It has a lot of things in it: sexual cynicism, allusions to kinky sex (on waking up to find that his mistress has tied his hands, the King asks 'What pretty game is this?' - she's actually about to Avenge her Honour), woman disguising herself as man, extreme ( Read more... )