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

Having retired from 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 compendium site of all the journeys, Lear’s projected “Topography of Greece”, is now available.

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