The very first volume of the online journal The Literary Magazine contains an intriguing piece on Milton, terrorism and revenge.
Like the call for papers for the Shakespeare Yearbook on “Shakespeare after 9/11,” Neil Forsyth’s article looks at early modern literature from the perspective of our current political context. It is an intelligent and broad-ranging [...]

A post on early modern machines on Peacay’s award-winning blog BibliOdyssey reminded me of an early modern reading machine. It was designed by Agostino Ramelli who published the idea in his Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostina Ramelli in 1588. It was apparently never built in the early modern period itself, but [...]

“Now the trouble began,” Virginia Woolf writes in A Room of One’s Own. “The student who has been trained in research at Oxbridge has no doubt some method of shepherding his question past all distractions till it runs into its answer as a sheep runs into its pen. The student by my side, for instance, [...]

This is such a cool idea: bookcrossing! I just found out that there are no less than 395 practising book-crossers living in my city. Who knows, maybe I’ll find a lonely book somewhere in a café this weekend. The idea is so popular that it’s in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:

bookcrossing
n. the practice of leaving [...]

I was reading a review of John B. Thompson’s Books in the Digital Age: The Transformation of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United States at breakfast this morning. The review (by Eelco Ferwerda in the Dutch Academische Boekengids) discusses the fate of academic books in view of current developments such as [...]

The BBC is launching a new drama series on the life of Queen Elizabeth I next Monday Sunday. Like the 1998 film (starring Cate Blanchett and Joseph Fiennes), the series starts with Elizabeth’s perilous position during the reign of her sister, Queen Mary. I don’t particularly know any of the actors (except for Tara Fitzgerald, [...]

The website of the Internet Shakespeare Editions has been completely redesigned, and new material has been added. The site looks wonderful, and has been designed around such rooms as the Foyer, the Library, the Theatre and the Annex.

New features include a section on performance, and a collection of facsimiles that can be viewed online. [...]