It's not everyday you see (what appears to be) a heron in your garden pond.

I’m in the archives at King’s College, Cambridge this week doing research connected with my Visiting Fellowship with the Centre for Book Cultures & Publishing at Reading Univ. I’m researching EM Forster’s publishing activities.

Graduation Day! The photo is of me with my wonderful s'visor (Nicola Wilson - middle) & Pritha Mukherjee, a fellow Eng Lit PhD student. Pritha & both had Nicola as a s'visor, started our PhDs on the same day back in Oct 2021, & also ended our journeys on the same day.

Paul Weller at Ludlow Castle last night.

The laugh of the day comes from… Rachel Reeves!

My brother painted me this portrait of (a portrait of) Virginia Woolf for passing my viva.

Happy Bloomsday!

I completed the minor corrections to my PhD thesis last week, & today I heard that I will be officially awarded my doctorate in 2 weeks' time. 🥳🎉

I’m going to miss these 4 books when I have to return them to my university library next week (because I've completed my doctorate). I’ve had them at home with uninterrupted access since I first took them out on loan 4.5 years ago.

The Gwen John retrospective at the National Museum, Cardiff - "Strange Beauties" - is well worth a visit. I recently read Alicia Foster's biog of John & it was fabulous to see in the flesh the paintings Forster discusses. John really captures the essence of her subjects. The exhibition ends 28 June.

Doing a @joannechocolat.bsky.social this morning & working in the shed. Nearby, the birds are singing, the cows are mooing, the sheep are baaing… & I’m working on my thesis corrections.

Oscar Wilde on why art should never try to be popular. From The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891).

It’s well known that Elizabeth Barrett-Browning lived at Wimpole Street, London before eloping to Florence, but she lived the first half of her life in Herefordshire - near to where I now live. The Ledbury Poetry Festival is hosting an EBB Walk in Ledbury July. www.ticketsource.com/ledburypoetr...

Visited Henry James’ former home - Lamb House - in Rye today. EF Benson (Mapp & Lucia) also lived there after James.

So just what do you do after successfully completing your PhD viva on Virginia Woolf & EM Forster? Yes, that’s right, you walk from Charleston & across the South Downs to see the glorious murals painted by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Quentin Bell at Berwick Church.

So just what do you do after successfully completing your PhD viva on Virginia Woolf & EM Forster? Yes, that’s right, you take a short break in sunny Sussex to see the Hogarth Press exhibition at Charleston on Firle!

I successfully defended my thesis yesterday. I passed with minor corrections. My examiners were perceptive, probing, and very supportive, which helped make my viva an enjoyable experience. In hindsight, I would have answered some questions differently, but I guess that’s normal.

In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the Holy Grail poem mentions “visions” of the grail & a quest in which Lancelot “leapt” from a boat onto “a rock” on which sits a tower. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse also features a “vision” (Lily Briscoe’s) & Mr Ramsey leaps from a boat onto the lighthouse rocks.

Homebaked hot cross buns.

Just discovered that Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and E.M. Forster's edition of Eliza Fay's Original Letters from India (1779-1815) were published by the Hogarth Press on the same day: 14 May 1925.

A friend recently visited London's Sambourne House - former home of illustrator, Linley Sambourne. Also the home of Cecil Vyse from A Room with a View (1985). Comparing my friend's photo with a film still, I noticed that the room's pictures & ornaments in 1985 are sitting in the same place today!

Apparently, buying books by the metre is now a thing. (From the latest TLS.)

Paid a visit to the fabulous Costume Couture exhibition at London’s Fashion & Textile Museum yesterday. For EM Forster fans, they exhibited these costumes from Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View & Howards End, together with one of Peggy Ashcroft’s costumes from David Lean’s A Passage to India.

Watching Stoppard’s Arcadia at the Old Vic tonight.

EM Forster's modernist credentials received a huge boost in the US in May 1924, when his piece, "Eliza in Chains" appeared alongside Mann's "Death in Venice" & a short essay on Matisse in The Dial magazine. It was published just weeks before the Aug 1924 release of A Passage to India in the US.

TS Eliot on academia: “I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls . . . Oxford is very pretty, but I don’t like to be dead." Eliot to Conrad Aiken, 31/12/1914.

This anecdote by Brian Fagan about EM Forster made me laugh this morning. (Fagan took over Edward Arnold's publishing house when Arnold retired in 1930.) The passage is from "Aspects of E.M. Forster" (1969).

And then my heart with pleasure… pops, And dances with the… snowdrops.

Yesterday, I received the fabulous news that I've been awarded a fellowship by the @cbcp-unirdg.bsky.social. I'll get funding to research correspondence related to EM Forster's efforts to get published in the US in the 1920s. A month in the archives. What's not to like?

Author Andrew Miller on EM Forster. More at www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...