I am a highly approachable Independent Expert Private English/English Literature Tutor located in Greater Manchester with over twenty years teaching and tutoring experience from Secondary to Postgraduate Degree level.
Well I started the book last night and have thus been reunited with Lisbeth Salander, this time in the midst of Hurricane Matilda where she disposes of a potential… Read More »Stig Larsson: The Girl Who played with Fire
Sometimes a day in bed with the aftermath of migraine can yield untold pleasure! This book had been recommended in the most positive terms and had sat by the side… Read More »The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Chapter 8 Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens Nicholas assisted his master to put on an old fustian shooting- jacket, which he took down from a peg in the passage; and… Read More »Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby and Great Expectations
You could travel up the Blue Nilewith your finger, tracing the routewhile Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.That for an hour, then a skittle of milkand the chalky… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy: Mrs Tilscher's Class ( Three-see rest of blog!)
Mrs Lazarus I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a dayover my loss, ripped the cloth I was married infrom my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawedat the… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy : Mrs Lazarus (again see rest of blog)
Dark School It is dusk when I enter the classroom, the last of the chalky Latin verbs going out on the board. I sit at a desk at the back… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy: Dark School
The Going Why did you give no hint that night That quickly after the morrow’s dawn, And calmly, as if indifferent quite, You would close your term here, up… Read More »Thomas Hardy: The Going
“It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days. An expedition, I should say, which I will undertake… Read More »The Remains of the Day: Kazuo Ishiguro
Are you a reader? Do you read then…? Katherine’s words seemed exiled from her mouth. These attempts at friendship were almost quaint these days and yet for the moment she… Read More »Promise
The dog with golden eyes watched the woman with the stick picking her way across the church yard. Somehow she needed him to watch her find this place and he… Read More »Nature
And when we reached the Casino, of course Mrs. Raddick wasn’t there. There wasn’t a sign of her on the steps–not a sign. “Will you stay in the car while… Read More »Katherine Mansfield: The Young Girl
‘But there are other kilings that are harder to connnect, the links between them obscured by great distances, by the passage of years, by the layering of this honeycomb world… Read More »John Connolly: The Reapers
Neutral Tones We stood by a pond that winter day, And the sun was white, as though chidden of God, And a few leaves lay on the starving sod, –… Read More »Thomas Hardy: Neutral Tones
Swiveller sat in silence. Her head was dancing inside with the side-long glimpse of the creature again. Why were the visits becoming so close, so near? This time she had… Read More »Swiveller
Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, Saying that now you are not as you were When you had changed from the one who was all… Read More »The Voice by Thomas hardy
ISBN: 0099322617 If you ain’t heard of this one then you probably can’t relate to Afghan coats, progressive rock and a spot of terminal introspection that makes Franz Kafka look… Read More »Robert M Pirsig – Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
You could travel up the Blue Nilewith your finger, tracing the routewhile Mrs Tilscher chanted the scenery.Tana. Ethiopia. Khartoum. Aswan.That for an hour, then a skittle of milkand the chalky… Read More »In Mrs Tilscher's Class by Carol Ann Duffy and Death Of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney
Aubade I work all day, and get half drunk at night.Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.In time the curtain edges will grow light.Till then I see what’s really… Read More »Aubade by Larkin
The Explosion On the day of the explosionShadows pointed towards the pithead:In the sun the slagheap slept. Down the lane came men in pitbootsCoughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,Shouldering off the… Read More »Larkin 'The Explosion' from 'High Windows'
“Out”, not just a book, not just a novel, but an accurate depiction of of life as it is and the consequences of what can happen when an ordinary situation… Read More »Out by Natsuo Kirino
‘Isn’t that – isn’t that remarkable? Biff – he likes me!’ 1) Consider your impressions of Willy Loman as interpreted by Dustin Hoffman. How does Hoffman create ‘Loman’ and… Read More »Death of a Salesman: Arthur Miller
Watching the film with the class yesterday, I was aware of my son’s repeated frown and bemusement. What he seemed to be communicating was going on with Willy Loman? What… Read More »Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller: Where is daddy in the film!
Watched Poirot last night featuring this most personable of characters! A Fox terier with a predilection for detective work!! I couldn’t stop smiling at him all evening! The eyes… Read More »Hercule Poirot's Dog!
My favourite song of the year with Duffy’s Mercy! Who could resist the elation, the swinging joy of the chorus line..and the video is infectious, sexy and makes you want… Read More »The Promise: Girls Aloud!
Dressed as she was for her last walk, they had laid the dead lady on her bed. She was never interesting in life; in death she was not impressive; and… Read More »The Weir of Hermiston : Robert Louis Stevenson
At childhood’s end, the houses petered outinto playing fields, the factory allotmentskept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,the silent railway line, the hermit’s caravan,till you came at last to the… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy: Little Red-Cap
“My mind,” he said, “rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own… Read More »The Sign of Four: Conan Doyle
There was a dark shape crouched on the ice. Katherine steadied her arm on her new friend and peered down at the small creature aware of her own need to… Read More »Communion
Northanger Abbey Three: Chapter XXII ‘….to make sense of our lives where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends,… Read More »Northanger Abbey: Three
I Crave Your Mouth, Your Voice, Your Hair DON’T GO FAR OFF, NOT EVEN FOR A DAY Don’t go far off, not even for a day, because — because… Read More »Pablo Neruda
