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.
Oranges are not the Only Fruit was a source of joy on one month’s Inter-rail. The book was passed around between us in carriages and acquired pizza stains and sand… Read More »Winterson's original passion: Oranges for Valentine's Day!
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.… Read More »Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Friend of the Mind
Skellig is a novel whose eponymous protagonist lives in a garage, eats aspirin and Chinese take away, all washed down with brown ale. He is also an arthritic angel who… Read More »Skellig: David Almond's Angelic owl
No guesses for why Rimbaud remains a cult figure! A poem for all those of us with shamanistic tendencies! To me. The story of one of my eccentricities.… Read More »Rimbaud: The Alchemy of the Word( from A Season In Hell)
`…it is not drawn with the free lines of a free man; it has the half-witted secrecies of a hunted thief. It does not look merely like a picture of… Read More »Fagin in his cell: Oliver Twist's Nemesis pictures his end
”A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even as they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to… Read More »Introduction
A long time ago a remarkable friend told me that a life without this song would be a life missing an essential joy! It still makes me tingle everytime I… Read More »A thing of beauty is a joy forever: Aretha Franklin's I say a little prayer!
Anne Hathaway by Carol Ann Duffy from The World’s Wife ‘Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed …’ (from Shakespeare’s will) The bed we loved in… Read More »Anne Hathaway: Carol Ann Duffy’s Written On the Body?
Opens almost like Sex Pistols ‘Anarchy in UK’ and just as rousing. Wild. ‘ fear is a curse, the terror of twilight, the fear of the night time, a… Read More »Keeping you Alive: Gossip Standing in the way of Control
“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites. It gives you knowledge of the world and experience of… Read More »Why read?
Any thoughts on Woolf’s novel?
A few weeks ago I posted a revision site’s curiously ‘blind” reading of Duffy’s ‘Warming her Pearls’ which interpreted the poem just in terms of class- ignoring the obviously subversive… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's Warming her Pearls : A new take on Upstairs Downstairs?
‘ Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees for a pulse of moment, a figure at the foot of the bed, against the wall… Read More »Michael Ondaatje and Virginia Woolf : A Wave of the Mind two
‘You look all dark.’ He drew back the curtains and called it an effect of light, but when I came into my studio to dress I saw it was… Read More »Waves of a Mind : Katherine Mansfield and Unthinkability!
As for the mot juste, you are quite wrong. Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But… Read More »Virginia Woolf and the Rhythm of Memory: 'A Wave in the Mind.'
First of all, paint a cage with an opened little door then paint something attractive something simple something beautiful something of benefit for the bird Put… Read More »A Portrait of a bird: Jaques Prevert's excursion into Wonderland
‘ Where i lived – winter and hard earth.i sat in my cold stone roomchoosing tough words, granite, flint, to break the ice. My broken heart –… Read More »A Commentary on Demeter: Perhaps Carol Ann Duffy's finest poem?
Demeter was late for the coach. Mr Tallis had been told by a reliable source in the Upper fifth that she was in love with the small Saker Falcon… Read More »Demeter
Give Me A Ticket For An AeroplaneI Ain’t Got Time To Take No Fast TrainOh ,The Lonely Days Are GoneI’m coming HomeMy Baby She Wrote Me A Letter … Read More »Why letter writing is a bad idea in Macbeth
Read this article and felt nothing but shame and profound anger that this country’s policy on asylum and immigration should have degenerated to this. What sort of society have we… Read More »Bokhari Family: The Independent Thursday 01/02/07 Austin Mitchell
The look of loveIs in your eyesThe look your smile can’t disguiseThe look of loveIs saying so much moreThan just words could ever sayAnd what my heart has heardWell it… Read More »The Look of Love: Or why we should go to Woolf's Lighthouse!
When I think of those east end lights, muggy nightsThe curtains drawn in the little room downstairsPrima donna lord you really should have been thereSitting like a princess perched in… Read More »Someone Saved My life Tonight: Moments of Being Elton Style?
Vermeer is so modern. The power of his glimpses of ‘glanced’ moments is immense. Can remember going around a wonderful gallery last summer and I just kept returning to a… Read More »Expectancy: A Story by Vermeer
‘One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think.’Woolf writing in her diary of 1925… Read More »Virginia Woolf: To the lighthouse
Mark’s Retraction! ( Mark says this is NOT a leopard, but then ……am sure JW likes cheetahs!) I criticised The Passion without giving any examples of what I love about… Read More »Mark's Retraction re: Winterson
‘ Classic realist narrative turns on the creation of enigma through the precipitation of disorder which throws into disarray the conventional cultural and signifying systems…But the story moves inevitably… Read More »Unfinished business: Dickens' s Mystery of Edwin Drood and Landlessness
‘I wasn’t being awkward, ‘ Prior said. ‘That was concern.’ ‘ I didn’t , but it doesn’t matter. I don’t sleep much after four anyway. ‘ He caught the flicker… Read More »Regenerating Billy Prior: Pat Barker's Regeneration
I sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At ten o’clock our neighbours drove me home. In the porch I met my… Read More »Seamus Heaney: Commentary on Mid-Term Break
Baby Sitting I am sitting in the wrong room listeningFor the wrong baby. I don’t loveThis baby. She is sleeping a snufflyRoseate, bubbling sleep; she is fair;She is a perfectly acceptable child.I am afraid of her. If she wakesShe will hate me. She will shoutHer hot midnight rage, her noseWill stream disgustingly and the perfume Of her breath will fail to enchant me. To her I will represent absoluteAbandonment. For her it will be worseThan for the lover cold in lonelySheets; worse than for the woman who waitsA moment to collect her dignityBeside the bleached bone in the terminal ward.As she rises sobbing from the monstrous landStretching for milk–familiar comforting,She will find me and between us twoIt will not come. It will not come.
720. Porphyria’s Lover THE rain set early in to-night, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to… Read More »Robert Browning: Porphyria's Lover
