HeyJaredOccasional diary
Thoughts about various topics occasioned by studying a PhD in English literature.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
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- Sep 15, 2026
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- Jul 16, 2026
Latest issues
In defence of references (opens the original)
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References have been on my mind a great deal of late, so it was with interest and some surprise that I saw my friend Alfie Robinson’s recent essay against references in my inbox. I was surprised for three reasons. First, I initially assumed that the ‘references’ mentioned in the title were the kind which provide attributions for quotati
First impressions of Korea (opens the original)
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If I were to tell you that I had mixed feelings as our plane banked towards the runway at Seoul’s Incheon Airport, I would be lying. My feelings were unadulterated terror, as they always are when a plane lands or takes off. Flying is a secular miracle, and I prefer my miracles religious.Were I to have had mixed feelings, however, I had many internal conflicts to choose between. One was between my grievance against travel, which I have previously aired on this forum, and my excitement at arriving
I was wrong about The Bostonians (opens the original)
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A few days ago, I wrote a post about Henry James’s The Bostonians in which I argued that the 1886 novel sets up a choice between private life and public service, without allowing the reader’s sympathies to fall definitively one way or the other. Yesterday, I received a comment in response from a certain Duke Maskell, retired professor of English Literature at Newcastle Polytechnic (now Northumbria University). Maskell is a critic adept at humane, common-sense readings entirely free from jargon o
The Bostonians (opens the original)
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The Bostonians nearly killed Henry James’s career. He published the novel in 1886, the same year as The Princess Casamassima. Both books deal with unusually political subject-matter for the usually recondite James, and both were commercial and critical failures. Considering the Boston of The Bostonians was just recovering from the civil war, in a country where slavery was a recent memory, its politics feel surprisingly familiar. The Bostonians are a pair of idealistic young women, Olive Chancell
Farewell to Botley (opens the original)
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Oxford is a watery city, ‘river-rounded’, an inland Venice. This gives it an odd shape. Look at a map of the place and you’ll see a small medieval nub, around which tendrils grow north, south, and west. The thickest of these is the former, comprising the dignified Victorian suburbs of Jericho, Park Town, and Summertown, which decline in glamour as they approach the northern ring-road. East Oxford is a patchy conurbation in its own right, as large as the centre and other suburbs put together.Most
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