The house of books rises higher

I read Karen Jankulak's very lucid new Writers of Wales critical biography of Geoffrey of Monmouth today - he's the guy who really got Arthur out of Wales and onto the European stage, and an early historian of pre-Saxon Britain, though his historical approach is to do as much diligent research as possible, then make the rest up. His work, especially Historia Brittonum, is therefore highly readable. 


More books turned up today - all for work. Volume 1 of Caryl Churchill's plays, including Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, based on Gerrard Winstanley's Christian Communist efforts at land reform during the English Civil War period. 


Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow, about the development in America of the divide between cultural activities - very useful for talking about Shakespeare, literature and class. 





Out of a sense of completeness rather than joy, Deborah Devonshire's Wait for Me - she's the last (and least interesting) Mitford sister. 


Also, some old Terry Eagleton essays, Against the Grain, mostly for his Land of Hope and Glory rewrite, 'The Ballad of English Literature"

Chaucer was a class traitor 

Shakespeare hated the mob 

Donne sold out a bit later 

Sidney was a nob

Marlowe was an elitist 

Ben Jonson was much the same 

Bunyan was a defeatist 

Dryden played the game

There’s a sniff of reaction 

About Alexander Pope 

Sam Johnson was a Tory 

And Walter Scott a dope

Coleridge was a right winger 

Keats was lower middle class 

Wordsworth was a cringer 

But William Blake was a gas

Dickens was a reformist 

Tennyson was a blue 

Disraeli was mostly pissed 

And nothing that Trollope said was true

Willy Yeats was a fascist 

So were Eliot and Pound 

Lawrence was a sexist 

Virginia Woolf was unsound

There are only three names 

To be plucked from this dismal set 

Milton Blake and Shelley 

Will smash the ruling class yet

Milton Blake and Shelley 

Will smash the ruling class yet