Poster showing Belgian refugees. Please send contributions to The Hon. Tres., Golden House, Gt. Pulteney St., London, W. England. Illustration signed with monogram FB. Title from item.

History book Chapter 4, Second Generation of British Colonies

Lord Kitchener says: The Germans have stripped and insulted British Prisoners and have shot some in cold blood. The Germans act with the same barbarous savagery as the Sudan Dervishes. The Prime Minister says: We shall not forget this horrible record of calculated cruelty and crime and we shall exact reparation against the guilty Germans. Poster is text only. Poster no. 100. Title from item.

“Reading Poetry” has several aims: primarily, to increase the ways you can become more engaged and curious readers of poetry; to increase your confidence as writers thinking about literary texts; and to provide you with the language for literary description. The course is not designed as a historical survey course but rather as an introductory approach to poetry from various directions – as public or private utterances; as arranged imaginative shapes; and as psychological worlds, for example. One perspective offered is that poetry offers intellectual, moral and linguistic pleasures as well as difficulties to our private lives as readers and to our public lives as writers. Expect to hear and read poems aloud and to memorize lines; the class format will be group discussion, occasional lecture.

Poster showing Belgian workers restoring a bomb damaged church. Open April 7 to 27 10 am to 8 pm Admission 1/- At University College Gower St. W.C. where contributions may be sent to The Belgium Town Planning Committee. Title from item.

This podcast from Saarland University offers challenging listening opportunities for upper intermediate to advanced learners and fascinating topics to do with the English language and culture. Published bi-weekly, with a growing archive of nearly 100 episodes, the podcast can be used in the context of traditional, e-learning, or blended learning courses as well as self-study approaches.

Taking as its starting point the works of one of Britain’s most respected, prolific—and funny—living dramatists, this seminar will explore a wide range of knowledge in fields such as math, philosophy, politics, history and art. The careful reading and discussion of plays by (Sir) Tom Stoppard and some of his most compelling contemporaries (including Caryl Churchill, Anna Deveare Smith and Howard Barker) will allow us to time-travel and explore other cultures, and to think about the medium of drama as well as one writer’s work in depth. Some seminar participants will report on earlier plays that influenced these writers, others will research everything from Lord Byron’s poetry to the bridges of Konigsberg, from Dadaism to Charter 77. Employing a variety of critical approaches (both theoretical and theatrical), we will consider what postmodernity means, as applied to these plays. In the process, we will analyze how drama connects with both the culture it represents and that which it addresses in performance. We will also explore the wit and verbal energy of these contemporary dramatists…not to mention, how Fermat’s theorem, classical translation, and chaos theory become the stuff of stage comedy.

Do poems think? Recurrent images of the poet as an inspired lunatic, and of poetry as a fundamentally irrational art, have often fostered an understanding of poets and their work as generally extraneous to the work of the sciences. Yet poets have long reflected upon and have sought to embody in their work the most elementary processes of mind, and have frequently drawn for these representations on the very sciences to which they are thought to stand - and sometimes do genuinely stand - in opposition. Far from representing a mere departure from reason, then, the poem offers an image of the mind at work, an account of how minds work, a tool for eliciting thought in the reader or auditor. Bringing together readings in British poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with writings from the emergent sciences of psychology and the physiology of the brain, this interdisciplinary course will explore the ways in which British poets, in years that witnessed the crucial development of these sciences, sought to capture an image of the mind at work. The primary aim of the course is to examine how several prominent genres of British poetry - the lyric, for instance, and the didactic poem - draw from and engage in this period with accounts of cognition within the sciences of psychology, physiology, and medicine. More broadly, the course aims to give undergraduates with some prior experience in the methods and topics of literary study an introduction to interdisciplinary humanistic research.

The course covers British literature and culture during Queen Victoria’s long reign, 1837-1901. This was the brilliant age of Charles Dickens, the Brontës, Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson – and many others. It was also the age of urbanization, steam power, class conflict, Darwin, religious crisis, imperial expansion, information explosion, bureaucratization – and much more.