William Rothenstein, Alice by the Fireside. Manchester Art Gallery.

After an academic career at the University of Bristol I am an independent scholar based in Oxford and London.  I first specialised in Victorian and Modern literature, especially the work of Robert Browning.  More recently I have concentrated on the reception of classical antiquity.


These pages include a list of publications, and describe some of my current and earlier projects. My most recent essay is:


“Ezra Pound’s Ragbag: The Cantos as Cento”, in Cento-Texts in the Making: Aesthetics and Poetics of Cento-Techniques from Homer to Zong! ed. Manuel Baumbach (Trier, 2022), pp. 21–40.


Individual writers I am interested in include James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, George Seferis and Seamus Heaney.

I continue to work on Edward Lear, bringing together the written and visual records of his Greek travels: the Cretan Journal, the Grecian travels of 1848 and the journeys in Greece and Albania in 1856 and 1857.

A new page, Lear in Zakynthos, Ithaca and Cephalonia in 1848, is now under construction, forming part of Lears projected “Topography of Greece”.

Edward Lear, Fruit trees, 1863. Yale Center for British Art.