From U to P: the unlikely route to a doctorate

At the age of 18, I failed a mock A-Level exam on the seventeenth-century poet, Andrew Marvell. Eleven years later, I submitted a doctoral thesis on him. This is a brief overview of the journey from failure to redemption. … More From U to P: the unlikely route to a doctorate

Falling Arse Over Tit Through History – A Lexical Journey

Published several decades after the first edition of Johnson’s dictionary, Francis Grose’s ‘A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue’ (1785) contained expressions that were already centuries old. Here’s a short history of a very familiar example, ‘arsy-varsey’. … More Falling Arse Over Tit Through History – A Lexical Journey