Vita and Virginia by Eileen Atkins (abridged by NKP Theatre Company) We are delighted to announce that NKP Theatre Company will bring their abridged version of Vita and Virginia by Eileen Atkins to this year’s Virginia Woolf Summer Course. A rare chance to see this fascinating, sometimes contentious, often moving interpretation of the relationship between Woolf and her sometime lover and lifelong friend, Vita Sackville-West. The play is free for members of the summer course. A small number of extra tickets will be available for sale from NKP. Further information about the extra tickets here ..read more

For our next Iris Murdoch course in 2025, we will study Iris Murdoch and art in five of her great novels. Each novel is associated with a particular art work. Titian, Sacred and Profane Love - Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Tintoretto, Susannah Bathing - Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose Bronzino, Venus and Cupid - Murdoch, The Nice and the Good Rembrandt, The Polish Rider - Murdoch, The Green Knight Gainsborough, Portrait of the Artist's Two Daughters - Murdoch, The Bell ..read more

Review of A. Trystan Edwards, The Things Which Are Seen (1921), New Statesman, 2 June 1921. If the readers of the New Statesman will buy Mr Edwards’ book they will heard of something to their advantage. They will learn that though they have always been accustomed to think themselves average men they are, by very reason of that fact, the only judges of art. Not only are they the only judges; they are the only creators. for the average man can cultivate his appearance, and that is the first of the arts; he can behave like a gentleman, and that is the second; he can dress well, and that is the th ..read more

‘Street musicians are counted a nuisance’ by the candid dwellers in most London squares, and they have taken the trouble to emblazon this terse bit of musical criticism upon a board which bears other regulations for the peace and propriety of the square. No artist, however, pays the least attention to criticism, and the artist of the streets is properly scornful of the judgment of the British public. It is remarkable that in spite of such discouragement as I have noted – enforced on occasion by a British policeman – the vagrant musician is if anything on the increase. The German band gives a w ..read more

The Novels of E. M. Forster I There are many reasons which should prevent one from criticizing the work of contemporaries. Besides the obvious uneasiness—the fear of hurting feelings—there is too the difficulty of being just. Coming out one by one, their books seem like parts of a design which is slowly uncovered. Our appreciation may be intense, but our curiosity is even greater. Does the new fragment add anything to what went before? Does it carry out our theory of the author's talent, or must we alter our forecast? Such questions ruffle what should be the smooth surface of our criticism and ..read more

Street Haunting: A London Adventure [Written in 1930.] No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner. As the foxhunter hunts in order to preserve the breed of foxes, and the golfer plays in order that open spaces may be preserved from the builders, so when the desire comes upon us to go street rambling the pencil does for a pretext, and getting up we say: "Really I must buy a penc ..read more

The great fires of intellectual life which burn at Oxford and at Cambridge are so well tended and long established That it is difficult to feel the wonder of this concentration upon immaterial things as one should. When, however, one stumbles by chance upon an isolated fire burning brightly without associations or encouragement to guard it, the flame of the spirit becomes a visible hearth where one may warm one's hands and utter one’s thanksgiving. It is only by chance that one comes upon them; They burn in unlikely places. If asked to sketch the condition of Bolton about the year 1885 one’s t ..read more

This essay was written in August 1940 and published in the New Republic, New York, 21 October 1940.  The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound – far more than prayers and anthems – that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we – not this one body in this one bed but minions of bodies ..read more

This essay by Woolf was published in the journal Nineteenth Century and After (April 1929) as part of a symposium on censorship.   As the law stands at present, a police magistrate has the right to destroy as obscene any book which he thinks likely to corrupt the mind of any reader who is liable to be corrupted. If it is advisable to entrust anyone with such power – of which I am doubtful – obviously the time has come when the nature of what is corrupting and thus destroyable must be more clearly defined. Nor is it difficult to suggest what lines that definition should follow. There ..read more

By one of those ironies of fashion that might have amused the Brownings themselves, it seems likely that they are now far better known in the flesh than they have ever been in the spirit. Passionate lovers, in curls and side-whiskers, oppressed, defiant, eloping — in this guise thousands of people must know and love the Brownings who have never read a line of their poetry. They have become two of the most conspicuous figures in that bright and animated company of authors who, thanks to our modern habit of writing memoirs and printing letters and sitting to be photographed, live in the flesh, n ..read more