For diplomats coming to the court of Charles I, it was more than a case  of knocking at the door and being shown in. In this Late Summer Lectures  podcast, Kimberley Foy uses the experience of visiting ambassadors to  show how attending the court of Charles I involved a carefully  choreographed set of moves, through particular spaces. For more information and an accessible transcript, visit our blog.

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Kathleen Foy from  Durham University explains how James Shirley’s 1639 tragedy The Politician reflected the court and politics of Charles I. For more information and an accessible transcript, visit our blog.

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Dr Amanda Blake  Davis of the University of Sheffield takes us on a flight through birds  and embodiment in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. For more information, and an accessible transcript, visit: https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/?p=30434

In this podcast from our Late Summer Lectures series, Alex Hobday  (University of Cambridge) examines how eighteenth-century culture sought to answer that eternal question: what is happiness, and how can we achieve it? For more information, and an accessible transcript, visit: https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/?p=30441

In a wide-ranging interview, Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist Jane Smiley explains  how literary characters take on a life of their own, reflects on the  representation of the body in literature, and examines her own status as  a female novelist emerging in the 1970s. This conversation between Dr Jennifer Terry and Jane Smiley was recorded at the Literary Dolls conference in 2014. Find out more at READ: Research English At Durham.

The Centre for Poetry and Poetics held an evening to celebrate the poetry and influence of T.S. Eliot.  Dr Gareth Reeves and Professor Jason Harding, two scholars who specialise in Eliot’s life and works, read from Eliot's own poetry and that of later poets such as Donald Davie and Hart Crane who were inspired by him. Find out more at READ: Research English At Durham.

John Clegg’s first collection, Antler,  features prehistoric landscapes, folk tale and myth. John’s  reading includes a history of a city in four stanzas, and the story of  an “ice road trucker.” John Clegg’s poetry is published by and copyright  of Salt Publishing. Find out more at READ: Research English At Durham.

Gareth Reeves’ third collection, To Hell With Paradise: New and Selected Poems,  has just been published by Carcanet. In this reading from the  collection, Gareth adopts a range of intriguing perspectives and voices,  including that of a cash machine looking at a man trying to withdraw  his money, and Dimitri Shostakovich thinking about bird droppings.  Gareth Reeves’s collection is published by and copyright of Carcanet. Find out more at READ: Research English At Durham.

Two of the Department’s published poets, Gareth Reeves and his PhD student John Clegg, explore how their writing of poetry relates to  their research.  They explain how they began writing poetry rather than writing about poetry, and discuss how writing poetry gives them unique insights into  the forms and methods employed in the work of other poets. Find out more at READ: Research English At Durham.

A century and a half since his birth, the Irish poet W.B. Yeats is one  of the best-loved in the English language, known for his lyric poems  such as ‘The Lake Isle of Innishfree’ or for romantic poems like ‘He  Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven.’ Throughout his literary career,  though, Yeats wrote in a range of styles and on diverse subjects. His  poems reflect his Irish nationalism, reinvent traditional genres, draw  inspiration from Irish myth and legend, and push into innovative...

Celebrate the literature and legacy of the Brontë sisters in this  podcast, recorded around the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth,  which features readings from and commentaries on their ground-breaking,  powerful, and influential novels and poems. Works featured include Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette alongside the poetry and prose of her sisters, Emily and Anne Brontë.  The readings also reflect the creative reimaginings inspired by the  Brontës’ fiction in the literature...

We humans are creatures of the  land, who usually observe the sea from above its surface. Beneath the  surface, though, the sea looks, sounds and feels like a distinct and  unique environment.  The poet Sarah Hymas invites us beneath the waves,  to perceive the sea and the interrelationship between sea and land,  between it and us, in deep and immersive ways. Find out more at https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-6Y1

Albion. Today that word conjures impressions of a lost, utopian version  of Britain – but the story of Albion as it was originally told in the  middle ages is anything but beautiful. According to the early Brut  chronicle, Albion was first discovered by a group of sisters who then  propagated with the wandering devils they found there, spawning a race  of giants. This was the strange land then conquered by Brutus, who gives  his name to modern Britain.  Madeleine Smart of the University of...

A king sits by the fire in a peasant’s cottage, brooding on the problems  of his kingdom. Suddenly the smell of burning fills the air. The cakes  left there by his host have been ruined. The king, of course, is Alfred  the Great. But this apocryphal story is just one of many not entirely  true tales that have surrounded this Anglo Saxon monarch through the  ages. David Barrow of the University of York suggests that these stories  tell us less about the king himself, and more about the ideas...

Do you get annoyed when people  rustle their crisp packets or check their mobile phones in the theatre?  If so you’re probably not alone – but you might be surprised to learn  that the convention that audiences should be quiet is a relatively new  one. It's also a norm that may exclude spectators who can't help but  fidget and make noise. Hannah Simpson (University of Oxford) invites us  to think carefully about how the etiquette of the theatre might be made  more inclusive, with benefits for...

The idea of genetic engineering  may conjure visions of futuristic horror, such as mutant human beings  with peculiar powers. But some novels and stories, particularly within  utopian literature, imagine more positive trends in human development,  whether driven by science or natural evolution over time. In this  podcast, Sarah Lohmann considers the complexity of approaches to  evolution and eugenics in utopian fiction, and suggests that the genre  itself has evolved in its depiction of these...

In 1592 the face of theatre  changed forever. From the death of Julius Caesar and its wide political  ramifications, to the love between Antony and Cleopatra played out on an  epic scale, tragic drama had traditionally been associated with the  lives of noble characters drawn from a ruling elite. But the anonymous  play The Tragedy of Master Arden of Faversham enabled playwrights to  conceive of the stage as the setting for more intimate, family dramas.  Iman Sheeha, of the University of...

The idea of vivisection –  performing surgical experiments on live animals in the name of science –  makes many people squeamish. Not surprisingly, the ethics of animal  experimentation were hotly debated in the Victorian period too. Asha  Hornsby (University College London) shows how novelists of the time  sought to understand the mentality of the vivisectionist, who needed to  maintain uncannily cool dispassion as he prodded and dismembered the  furry creature before him. Find out more at...

The word ‘romance’ conjures images  of men and women meeting one another and falling helplessly in love.  But if we trace the literature of ‘romance’ back to its roots in the  medieval period, we encounter many stories where chivalric knights and  ladies refuse or fail to conform to convention. Hannah Piercy takes us  on a tour through some of this historic writing of the heart – though  she starts with an example that is much closer to home. For more information visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7bP

Durham University’s Palace Green  Library is home to many medieval manuscripts, but among the most  precious is one of just three surviving collections of poetry written by  the hand of one Thomas Hoccleve – fourteenth-century civil servant,  letter writer, and poet. Laurie Atkinson puts some of Hoccleve’s  literary output under the reading lamp, as he argues that this  disremembered figure deserves to seen in his own right rather than  hidden in the shadow of his immediate poetic...

“Poetry doesn’t ask you how old you are at the door”, says Caroline Bird, reflecting on the fact that her first collection, Looking at Letterboxes, was published when she was aged just 15. Since then, Caroline has authored four more collections, won numerous awards, and been the official poet of the London Olympics – great hallmarks indeed, but in this conversation with Suzannah V. Evans, recorded at StAnza Poetry Festival in 2019, she reveals why her poetry can also be identified by analogy...

Imagine yourself immersed in a  beautiful landscape, and being moved by the view before your eyes. To  remember the experience, perhaps you might take a photograph. But while a  photograph can snap a single moment, a still image doesn’t really  reflect the way your original experience unfolded through time. Can  writing achieve something different? Both William Wordsworth and James  Joyce were interested in the problem of how to represent the continuous  stream of conscious experience. Adam...

Do you walk on a sidewalk or a pavement? Eat fries or chips? The differences between American and British English can seem trivial at times, but they point to a deeper debate around language and identity that has been fought in the literary sphere as well as in everyday life.  What differentiates American writers from their English literary counterparts? And even looking within America rather than across the Atlantic, since America is a diverse and huge nation comprising many different forms...

There can be few things in life more tragic than the death of a child. Not surprisingly, when this is represented in literature, the deathbed scene will surely be poignant, empathetic and emotionally memorable. But as Morven Cook and Oliver Hancock discuss in conversation together, nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century texts are very different in their approach, moving away from representations of the child as the angel of innocence to a more realistically human portrayal. For more...