We avoid them in formal writing but they pepper our emails … In 'Ellipsis in English Literature', Dr Anne Toner explores the history of dots, dashes and asterisks used to mark silence of some kind. The focus of the book – the first to look exclusively at the backstory of these marks – is communication.
A literary puff is the promotional blurb that appears on book jackets and publishers’ press releases. Dr Ross Wilson, Faculty of English, discusses the nature of the rave review and asks whether it counts as criticism.
A five-day programme of events at Homerton College, Cambridge, will celebrate the publication, 150 years ago, of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’. Here, Dr Zoe Jaques, a lecturer in children’s literature, explores images of Alice from the first edition onwards.
‘Dumberdash’ is an old Cheshire term for a short but violent storm. A ‘lumpenhole’ is a deep trench for fluid farmyard waste. The man who remembers these words is among the scores of people who have written to Dr Robert Macfarlane in response to his latest book, Landmarks.
In her new book Representations of the Gypsy in the Romantic Period, Sarah Houghton-Walker provides a fascinating insight into writers’ and artists’ portrayals of wanderers. Her study focuses on a period when gypsies’ fragile place in the landscape, and on the margins of society, came increasingly under threat.
A 13th-century manuscript of Arthurian legend once owned by the Knights Templar is one of the star attractions of a new exhibition opening today at Cambridge University Library.
MOOCs – or massive open online courses – have been touted a cure for the education sector’s ills by some, but merely the latest symptom of it by others. ICE’s Jenny Bavidge discusses the challenges of online teaching and her experience of ICE’s SOCCs (small online closed courses).
The University of Cambridge’s first Master of Studies (MSt) in Creative Writing will explore the art of writing in all its many forms and guises, not just novel writing, according to Course Director Dr Sarah Burton.
A letter written in 1868 by Charles Dickens, the bicentenary of whose birth falls today, to his son Henry, who had newly arrived at Cambridge, reveals a touching concern for Henry’s welfare in matters physical, moral and spiritual.
Clare Holtham (1948-2010) had a huge enthusiasm for learning. After a troubled childhood, which led to a spell of homelessness, she became an intrepid traveller and independent-minded student at Newnham College, Cambridge. A book of Clare’s poems called The Road from Herat, launched today at Newnham, reflects a life lived to the full. It included working on the buses and a rapid marriage to an Uzbek chieftain.
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