Absalom, Absalom! is arguably Faulkner’s most difficult, but also his most brilliant work. Eminent Faulkner critic and historian Fred Hobson (2003), like many others, claims that it is Faulkner’s masterwork, “not only because of the richness of its story . . . its tragic dimension, its prose, and its narrative complexity (The Sound and the Fury shares these, after all) but also because of its keen historical sense. Absalom is the Faulkner novel that deals . . . most centrally with what C. Vann Woodward calls ‘the burden of southern history’—that is, the racial burden—and it is a work that paints in many particulars, a realistic picture of antebellum life in the Deep South and explores the origins and the meaning of ‘aristocracy’ in that region. In no other Faulkner novel, perhaps no American novel, are all elements of that critical triumvirate, race, class, and gender, explored so compellingly”.

Absalom, Absalom tells the story of Thomas Sutpen, a brooding and enigmatic stranger who comes to fictional Jefferson in the early 1830’s with a wagon load of enslaved Haitians and a French architect from New Orleans to wrest his mansion out of the muddy bottoms of the north Mississippi wilderness, to sculpt it into an aristocratic bastion of power and to engender a dynasty through the force of his sheer will. Faulkner says that Sutpen was a man “who wanted sons and the sons destroyed him”—true–but Sutpen is both the progenitor and the author of his own downfall through a curious combination of sheer innocence, blind pride, and moral bankruptcy.

Coming back to Absalom, Absalom! after many years feels like returning to a haunted house you once loved. The place is still there, echoing with monstrous voices, still as impressive and unlivable as ever! While Absalom, Absalom is one of Faulkner’s most Gothic novels, Faulkner’s gift is to wed that genre’s ghostly, claustrophobic intensity to modernist formal experimentation, his technical innovations (shifting perspectives, fragmented chronology, intricate, lyrical prose, etc.) adding to the oppressive emotional weight of an intergenerational past which suffuses the present.

Deborah Robbins (1981) explains that for the characters in Absalom, Absalom, telling is a matter of life and death: “[T]he narrators speak with the desperate eloquence of people who fear the interruption of a story they must tell, a story of great personal significance. Each shapes the Sutpen material to a pattern reflecting the teller’s own idiosyncratic vision, hoping to win confirmation of the identity defined by that ordering of experience. But while Miss Rosa, Mr. Compson, Shreve and Quentin all seek witnesses to their self-creation in the stories they tell, all resist the self-effacing passivity of listening. To assume the role of teller is to make a claim to identity, while to surrender that claim is a small death. Thus, the right to tell is repeatedly challenged and usurped in the novel as the narrators compete for the instrument of self assertion”.

So where does that leave us—the readers? Do we surrender to the tale or do we compete (or collaborate?) with its narrators in a search for meaning: Duncan Aswell (1968) claims that Faulkner’s “daring and brilliant strategy in Absalom, Absalom! is to divide us against ourselves, our emotional against our intellectual responses, by providing us with continually more irresistible and subtle rhetorical arguments until we forget what we have been asked to take on faith and what we can safely accept as known and proven. Faulkner plays upon precisely those needs and desires in us that he shows operating in his characters, and demonstrates the truth of his fable by making us equally blind and hopeful participants in the search for illumination”.

Please join us as we compete and collaborate with some of literature’s most famous narrators in unraveling the mysteries of this spellbinding classic!

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-week study led by John Allemand and Deborah Lawunmi live on Zoom

Mondays, 28 September – 9 November 2026, 5.00-7.30 pm (UK time)

£350 for seven meeting study with two facilitators (17.5 hours)

Recommended edition: Absalom, Absalom!, Norton Critical Edition (2023), edited by Susan Scott Parrish, ISBN-10: 0393422585, ISBN-13: 978-0393422580.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

JOHN ALLEMAND & DEBORAH LAWUNMI

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Time

2 November 2026 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

9November 5:00 pm

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Romeo and Juliet - William ShakespeareEIGHT-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 19 OCTOBER - 7 DECEMBER 2026, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026mon02nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyDramaLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJane Wymark

Event Details

*Juliet, John William Waterhouse, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

The NATO phonetic alphabet was devised so that words could be spelled out over radio or telephone, to avoid mistakes in communication through interference of any kind. The fact that the word selected for the letter J is Juliet, and for R is Romeo confirms the universal recognition of those two names. The story of the star-crossed lovers had been told several times before Shakespeare’s play, but it is this – his second tragedy – that brought the story undying fame.

Romeo and Juliet was written around 1595-6 and shares these dates and broad themes with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The opening scenes of both plays include stern edicts: in Romeo and Juliet Prince Escalus of Verona, tired of the public disturbances caused by the feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, warns the two families ‘If ever you disturb our streets again, Your lives shall pay the forfeit of the peace.’ In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus, father to Hermia, asks Duke Theseus to condemn her to death if she will not agree to marry the groom he has chosen for her.

Either play could end in tragedy, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream a journey through the woods and the intervention of spirits leads to a happy resolution and the farcical performance by ‘rude mechanicals’ of Pyramus and Thisbe, the play within the play which reflects the plot of Romeo and Juliet. In contrast, Romeo and Juliet have no such luck, the series of errors and accidents that befall them, from the death of Mercutio to the failure of the Mantua postal service, leads to the tomb rather than the wedding feast.

The language of the play is wonderfully varied and intricate. It begins with a chorus speech – a sonnet very much in the Petrarchan mode – and goes straight from there to a prose scene between servants that begins with jokes but rapidly leads to a street fight and the entrance of Prince Escalus. Our first sight of Romeo, entering after the fight is over and sighing over Rosaline, is of the doting lover, seemingly more in love with love than with a flesh and blood creature:

‘O heavy lightness, serious vanity,
Misshapen chaos of well seeming forms,
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health,
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.’

His first encounter with Juliet is a conversation contained within a sonnet. The language they use has none of the fashionable oxymorons, it takes one simple image – that of a pilgrim – and gives it the intensity and all-consuming passion of first love. They understand each other completely.

Shakespeare’s only other tragedy at this point was Titus Andronicus, firmly placed in ancient Rome and, although nominally set in the Renaissance of the 1300’s, Romeo and Juliet feels much closer in time to the contemporary audience than the usual classical settings. The play is culturally ubiquitous, it has reached beyond theatre to film, song, meme and even the NATO phonetic alphabet! It dramatises the conflicts – between love and hate, social structure and individual desire, tradition, fate and free will – that every generation reinvents in its own terms.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Jane Wymark

Mondays, 19 October – 7 December, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

Recommended edition: Romeo and Juliet (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series) edited by Rene Weis, ISBN: 978-1903436912

£280.00 for eight two-hour meetings, to include background notes and resources.

Organizer

Jane Wymark

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Time

2 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

9November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm16November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm23November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm30November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm7December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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The Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann (early)THIRTEEN WEEK STUDY, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS & SARAH SNOXALL LIVE ON ZOOM, 22 SEPTEMBER - 15 DECEMBER, 12.00-2.00 PM (UK TIME)2026tue03nov12:00 pm2:00 pm12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM

Event Details

Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel The Magic Mountain is often grouped with two other giant literary classics, James Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Together these works are seen as the formative novels of the Modernist era.

A first dip into the text of The Magic Mountain reveals an accessible, lilting narrative in which readers soon find themselves considering time, society, passion and memory from the particular perspective of an invalid needing medical care in an environment far removed from regular life. But we are not concerned solely with the beauty of the prose, but about the power and seduction of the realm of the mind.

Unlike some books we study in the Salon, the challenge of reading The Magic Mountain lies not just in decoding and teasing out the themes, patterns and narrative play (although we do have a VERY playful narrator), but in grasping mountainous ideas: philosophies, paradigms and approaches to constructing our lives in purposeful ways. Do we aim for the purity of transcendent music? Do we indulge in the decadence of the senses when we recognise the limits of time? Do we try to catalogue suffering and thus reveal the beautiful rationality of humankind and our ability to overcome the pain of living? All this is considered from the rarefied perspective of this mountain retreat, a Swiss Sanatorium on the verge of the First World War.

Often funny, occasionally erotic, moments of the fantastical clash with the absurd, feasts, suicides, seances and war . . . it is a packed book that is also deeply political. Written between the First and Second World Wars, The Magic Mountain engages with questions of nationalism and nostalgia, with the shadow of future events shifting the weight of the ironic stance that Mann assumes.

A little knowledge of some of the German and Austrian thinkers whose fingerprints can be found in the pages – Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Freud, Heidegger – can be helpful but is not necessary for a thoroughly satisfying read. During the course of this study we will invite Keith Fosbrook to share a little of his expertise in this area with the group.

JOINING DETAILS:

Thirteen week study, live on Zoom, led by Toby Brothers and Sarah Snoxall with additional contribution from Keith Fosbrook.

Tuesdays, 12.00-2.00 pm (UK time), 22 September – 15 December 2026 (except for the second meeting in the series which will be from 12.00-2.00 pm on Wednesday 30 September).

We are also offering a later study (on Tuesdays only) from 22 September – 15 December 2026, 5.30-7.30 pm.

Recommended editions (2): The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679772873 OR Everyman, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-1857152890.

£490 for thirteen-week study.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Time

3 November 2026 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

10November 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm17November 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm24November 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm1December 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm8December 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm15December 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm

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'Loosening the ligaments': A LitSalon community of writers - Block 4SIX FACILITATED ONLINE MEETINGS TO SUPPORT CREATIVE WRITING PRACTICE, OCTOBER-DECEMBER 20262026tue03nov5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyCreative WritingLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByAlison Cable

Event Details

“But what is more to the point is my belief that the habit of writing thus for my own eye only is good practice. It loosens the ligaments. Never mind the misses and the stumbles. Going at such a pace as I do I must make the most direct and instant shots at my object, and thus have to lay hands on words, choose them and shoot them with no more pause than is needed to put my pen in the ink.”

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary

An invitation to writers of all levels (beginners are as welcome as the more experienced) — to loosen the ligaments, put perfection aside, and write for the quiet joy of discovery; to share a space where words unfold boldly, imperfectly, and in response to curiosity.

Rooted in the ethos of the London Literary Salon — where close reading and conversation open pathways to deeper understanding — this writing series, facilitated by Alison Cable, extends the same spirit of inquiry into creative practice. An invitation to explore writing as a way of thinking, feeling, and knowing.

Each block of three months offers a gentle rhythm of practice: a facilitated Anchor Session followed later in the month by a companion Open Writing Session, where you can return to your work, deepen the ideas sparked in the workshop, and write alongside others in quiet company.

How it works

Anchor Session (first Tuesday of each month, 5.00-7.00 pm, UK time):
A guided workshop exploring a theme, text, or prompt through discussion, short exercises and optional sharing. These sessions provide inspiration and direction for your writing practice.

Open Writing Session (third Tuesday of each month, 5:00–6:30 pm, UK time):
A lightly held, communal writing space in which you can develop your ideas, try new forms, or simply write in the company of others. Optional check-in and sharing at the end.

Block Pass: £105 for three months (includes three Anchor Sessions and three companion Open Writing Sessions). This block encourages continuity and engagement, with sessions scheduled monthly to help you build a routine.

Single Sessions: please enquire.

Block 1: January – March 2026

Anchor: 6 January | 3 February | 3 March

Open: 20 January | 17 February | 17 March

Block 2: April – June 2026

Anchor: 7 April | 5 May | 2 June

Open: 28 April | 19 May | 23 June

Block 3: July – September 2026

Anchor: 7 July | 4 August | 1 September

Open: 21 July | 18 August | 15 September

Block 4: October – December 2026

Anchor: 6 October | 3 November | 1 December

Open: 20 October | 17 November | 15 December

Organizer

Alison Cable

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Time

3 November 2026 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

17November 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm1December 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm15December 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm

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The Magic Mountain - Thomas MannTHIRTEEN WEEK STUDY, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS & SARAH SNOXALL LIVE ON ZOOM, 22 SEPTEMBER - 15 DECEMBER 20262026tue03nov5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM

Event Details

JOINING DETAILS:

Thirteen week study, live on Zoom, led by Toby Brothers and Sarah Snoxall with additional contribution from Keith Fosbrook.

Tuesdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time), 22 September – 15 December 2026. Please note that there is also an earlier study from 12.00 noon-2.00 pm (UK time) on the same dates.

Recommended editions (2): The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, translated by John E. Woods, Vintage, ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0679772873 OR Everyman, ISBN-13‏: ‎ 978-1857152890.

£490 for thirteen-week study.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Time

3 November 2026 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

...

Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

10November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm17November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm24November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm1December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm8December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm15December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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Madame Bovary by Gustave FlaubertEIGHT MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 20 OCTOBER - 8 DECEMBER 20262026tue03nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureVIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByRalph Kleinman

Event Details

“La Bovary, c’est moi.“

Gustave Flaubert

“Quand Mme Bovary parut, il y eut toute une révolution littéraire… Le code de l’art nouveau se trouvait écrit.“

“When Mme Bovary appeared, there was a whole literary revolution . . . the code of a new art was written.”

Emile Zola

Gustave Flaubert (1821 – 1880) is often referred to the first modern novelist and the inventor of literary realism. Madame Bovary arrived on the scene (trailing generally negative reviews and a lawsuit for offence against public morals and religion, of which Flaubert was acquitted) misunderstood and undervalued, but Flaubert knew that he had written a masterpiece. Time proved him correct.

Flaubert wrote precise fiction in reaction to idealism and romanticism. His goal was to present the world as it really was; there are no heroes in Madame Bovary. He used clear and concise language (he wanted to remove all poetry from his writing), a meticulous attention to detail, a crystalline structure, and brilliant psychological insights into his characters. Flaubert rejected the idea of artistic inspiration, and laboured like a mole for fifty-three months, testing every word for its aptness, and reading and rereading each sentence. But he wasn’t interested in merely creating the perfect form. He entered the emotional life of his characters, feeling his way through the novel. It was written in the early days of France’s industrial age, and Flaubert wanted literature to aid in the understanding of human nature, just as the natural sciences and social sciences did.

Madame Bovary appeared at number 10 in the Guardian’s 2026 ‘Best 100 Novels of All Time’ with good reason. Although it is completely embedded in its time and place, I believe it has much to say about how we live now, and this is something we will explore in this study. There are many young girls today who are living completely in the world of internet influencers, lost in a dream disconnected from any reality. Will they emulate Emma Bovary in our own age as they attempt to navigate the world as it really is?

N.B. A study of Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is planned for early in 2027.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study led by Ralph Kleinman

Tuesdays, 6.00-8.00 pm UK time

20 October to 8 December 2026

Recommended edition: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Classics, ISBN-13: 9780143106494 (to avoid confusion we ask that all participants use the same translation during study meetings)

£280 for eight meetings, to include opening notes and resources

Organizer

Ralph Kleinman

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Time

3 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

10November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm17November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm24November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm1December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm8December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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Poet tasting #1: TennysonTWO-MEETING STUDY, LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST LIVE ON ZOOM, TUESDAY 3 & 10 NOVEMBER, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026tue03nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyPoetryLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst

Event Details

*Alfred Lord Tennyson by Samuel Laurence, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

”Dark house, by which once more I stand

                           Here in the long unlovely street,

                           Doors, where my heart was used to beat

                  So quickly, waiting for a hand…”

We hope that this Salon on Tennyson will be the first of many, where Tim Swinglehurst invites salonistas to a tasting of a specific poet writing sometime between the English Renaissance and the outbreak of the First World War. His aim is that after two weeks you will be left wanting more!

In 1946 W.H. Auden articulated the polarised reception – Victorian idolisation versus Modernist rejection – of his venerable poetical predecessor, Alfred Lord Tennyson, writing “He had the finest ear, perhaps, of any English poet; he was also undoubtedly the stupidest; there was little about melancholia he didn’t know; there was little else that he did”. Tennyson’s mastery of form and exceptional ear for rhythm and lyrical phrasing (“the finest ear of any English poet since Milton” said T.S. Eliot) were praised; his preference for hypnotic, sensual musicality at the expense of intellectual rigour and moral seriousness condemned (according to F.R. Leavis he was guilty of an unhealthy, “dream world” escapism, while Eliot – again – described “a further stage in the disintegration of the intellect, the further separation of sound, image and thought”).

More generously, Professor Christopher Ricks has written, “That, among so much else, he knew – and could effect – consolation as no one else has in our tongue, knowing consolation in its substantiality as well as its limits; that he understood madness, bereavement, fear, shivering, erotic loveliness, undying friendship, loss, exquisite courtesy, as it has been given to very few to understand them.” Extraordinary that anyone should have such comprehensive understanding of melancholia as Auden claims for Tennyson, mind-boggling that his understanding may encompass so much more.

During this two-week Salon we will read short poems and selected passages from longer poems to taste Tennyson for ourselves and see how we respond to his verse. We will, among other poems, read from The Lotos-Eaters and Ulysses, listening to Tennyson in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey; explore a fraction of Tennyson’s grief and the mind-altering challenges of geology and cosmology to his faith expressed in In Memoriam; and journey into the deeply disturbed and deteriorating psyche of the narrator of the monodrama Maud. We will, most importantly, take time to read some of Tennyson’s verse aloud together, experiencing with our ears and voices the Tennyson ‘sound’.

“Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.”

JOINING DETAILS:

Two-meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom

Tuesday 3 & 10 November, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£80 for two meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

3 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

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THE GUERMANTES WAY (early)The third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, 13 WEEK STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM (early)2026wed04nov3:00 pm5:00 pm3:00 pm - 5:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureVIRTUAL Event Organized ByToby Brothers

Event Details

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

Marcel Proust

Facilitator Toby Brothers writes:

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the mountains of Modernism. This is my eighth tour through the Search and each visit reveals new nuggets and gasping moments. This third volume considers closely the draw of the social dance and the realm of social power: you might not think the anxious aristocracy of the Belle Epoque will teach you something about the world you live in – you will be surprised. The groups who have made it through the first two volumes in the last six months are lively and welcoming and we have room for two or three more to join us. If you have not read the first two volumes previously, please contact us to discuss.

Here is how one Salonista describes the pleasure and work of reading Proust: “This is a velvet jewel of a book that demands the attention of a lover full of enchantment and obsession, we need not get impatient as all good lovers perfect their art in taking their time.”

While another observes: “I feel really privileged to be gaining a better understanding of Proust’s amazing work and be able to enjoy the intricacies of his language and thoughts . . . the meetings allow plenty of time and space for exploration and our study is reinforced by emails and relevant essays in between meetings. I am very grateful to have this opportunity to join the study.”

Reading Proust teaches the reader to observe how the world is experienced, to be aware that although humans are tempted to give greater weight to the perceptual universe, it is the entwining of memory, idealised experience (dreams) and relationships with what our senses perceive that moulds our consciousness.

JOINING DETAILS:

It may be possible for new members to join this group of readers. If you are interested please email litsalon@gmail.com using the subject heading: ‘Joining Proust Group’.

Facilitated by Toby Brothers

Wednesdays, 3.00-5.00 pm (UK time)

Thirteen meeting study: 7 October – 9 December 2026, resuming from 13 January – 3 February 2027, N.B. these dates cover 14 weeks allowing one ‘spare’ week for use in case of illness.

Recommended edition: Vintage Classics (Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright) ISBN-13: 978-0099362418

£455 for thirteen meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

Salon Director...

Salon Director

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Time

4 November 2026 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

VIRTUAL

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

18November 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm25November 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm2December 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm9December 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm13January 20273:00 pm - 5:00 pm20January 20273:00 pm - 5:00 pm27January 20273:00 pm - 5:00 pm3February 20273:00 pm - 5:00 pm

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THE GUERMANTES WAY (Later)The third volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, 13 WEEK STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM (Later)2026wed04nov5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureVIRTUAL Event Organized ByToby Brothers

Event Details

“Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.”

Marcel Proust

Facilitator Toby Brothers writes:

JOINING DETAILS:

It may be possible for new members to join this group of readers. If you are interested please email litsalon@gmail.com using the subject heading: ‘Joining Proust Group’.

Facilitated by Toby Brothers

Wednesdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time)

Thirteen meeting study: 7 October – 9 December 2026, resuming from 13 January – 3 February 2027, N.B. these dates cover 14 weeks allowing one ‘spare’ week for use in case of illness.

Recommended edition: Vintage Classics (Moncrieff/Kilmartin/Enright) ISBN-13: 978-0099362418

£455 for thirteen meetings, includes background materials, literary criticism, opening notes and discussion notes.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

Salon Director...

Salon Director

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Time

4 November 2026 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

VIRTUAL

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

11November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm18November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm25November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm2December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm9December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm13January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm20January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm27January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm3February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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The Age of Innocence - Edith WhartonSIX MEETING STUDY, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 21 OCTOBER - 25 NOVEMBER, 6.30-8.30PM (UK TIME)2026wed04nov6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein

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Published in 1920 — the same year American women won the right to vote — The Age of Innocence is set in a world Edith Wharton knew from the inside: Old New York society, a closed world of inherited money and rigid ritual revolving around the unspoken rule that nothing shall ever, under any circumstances, be said plainly. What cannot be acknowledged cannot threaten. What cannot be named cannot exist.

Into this airless world arrives Countess Ellen Olenska, who has had the bad taste to flee an abusive marriage and the worse taste to expect her family’s support. She is sophisticated, unconventional, and faintly European. In short, dangerous. Newland Archer is engaged to the exquisitely correct May Welland. He should not be thinking about Ellen Olenska at all. What follows is a love story in which almost nothing happens and everything is at stake.

The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to receive it. The jury had voted for Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, only to be overruled by Columbia University’s conservative trustees, who found Lewis’s satire insufficiently “wholesome” — and awarded the prize to a novel whose entire project is the dissection of the world that word protects. Wharton, on learning the prize was meant for Lewis, wrote to him: “When I discovered that I was being rewarded — by one of our leading Universities — for uplifting American morals, I confess I did despair.”

In a cultural moment defined by the performance of virtue and the management of image — by the gap between the life curated for public consumption and the life actually lived — Wharton’s diagnosis of how societies enforce conformity, and what it costs the people who comply, has never felt more precise. She knew that the real cost of a society built on appearances isn’t borne by the people who break the rules. It’s borne by the people who keep them.

Let us read.

JOINING DETAILS:

Six-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

21 October – 25 November 2026

Wednesdays, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time)

£240 for six two-hour meetings

Recommended edition: The Age of Innocence, Penguin Classics, 1996. ISBN: 9780140189704

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

4 November 2026 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

11November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm18November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm25November 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

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The Remains of the Day - Kazuo IshiguroSIX-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 7 OCTOBER - 11 NOVEMBER, 7.00-9.00 PM (UK TIME)2026wed04nov7:00 pm9:00 pm7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByLewis Ward

Event Details

‘I believe it was then, looking on that view, that I began for the first time to adopt a frame of mind appropriate for the journey before me’

‘Stevens’

In a 2009 interview, Kazuo Ishiguro explained: ‘I started writing The Remains of the Day because of my suspicion that to some extent we are all butlers’.

What does it mean to realise, at the end of your life, that all your most dedicated efforts were inadvertently in the service of evil?

Can we ever see outside our own times, or are we doomed to limited perspectives based on unquestioned (unquestionable?) beliefs and cultural norms?

How do our daily habits of thought, our seemingly petty emotions and feelings, influence the most important moments of our lives and loves?

These are among the profound questions posed by Kazuo Ishiguro’s masterful third novel, which won the Booker Prize in 1990. Having hitherto set all his fiction in Japan, Ishiguro placed this new narrative in England before and after World War II, and made his hero that most traditional of English figures, the butler. But by Ishiguro’s own account, time and place were not central to the book’s genesis; rather, the theme of misplaced loyalty was uppermost in his plans. Indeed, the novel repeats much of the theme and structure of his previous novel, An Artist of the Floating World, which was set in the same time period but in Japan.

In The Remains of the Day, Ishiguro also perfected a nuanced version of the ‘unreliable narrator’. He created what he calls an ‘ironic gap’ between himself and Stevens, which in turn creates an implied reader – us – who gradually begins to see everything that Stevens himself cannot. As critic Adam Parkes writes, ‘The narrative is like a mirror that shows us Stevens as he sees himself, or as he wants us to see him, but that also enables us to picture him quite differently.’

But how exactly does Ishiguro achieve this? And how does this link to the novel’s themes of appeasement, idealism and loyalty?

On this six-week study we will begin to unravel Ishiguro’s deceptively simple narrative, which has perhaps been falsely ‘clarified’ by the hugely successful film version starring Anthony Hopkins. We will discover what this novel does that the film – perhaps any film? – cannot, and why it remains one of the most highly-regarded and best-loved novels of the twentieth century.

JOINING DETAILS:

Six-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Lewis Ward

Wednesday 7 October – 11 November 2026, 7.00-9.00 pm (UK time)

Recommended edition: The Remains of the Day, Faber & Faber, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0571258246

£210 for six meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Lewis Ward

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Time

4 November 2026 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

11November 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

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Dante's PurgatorioELEVEN MEETING STUDY, LED BY SEAN FORESTER LIVE ON ZOOM, 1 OCTOBER - 17 DECEMBER, 5.30-7.30 PM (UK TIME)2026thu05nov5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyPoetryLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySean Forester

Event Details

*Gustave Doré, Dante’s Purgatorio, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Dante’s epic journey through the afterlife continues in the Purgatorio. Here the poet explores self-transformation: How do we let go of pride, hatred, lust, jealousy and greed? How can we move from cruelty and to kindness, from sin to salvation?

Dante writes in the first person as a very human voyager, reacting with strong and varied emotions to the characters before him, just as the reader might. As we pass through an array of landscapes, each appropriate to the sins and purgations there, Dante undergoes a kind of transformation himself. And he challenges us to do the same.

You don’t need to have read Dante’s Inferno to join this study. Dante, like Joyce, is an ideal author for in-depth study at the LitSalon. The Divine Comedy has multiple meanings that provide rich material for discussion, weaving together myth, theology, history and the contemporary life of Dante’s time. We will explore Dante’s relationship with Virgil and Beatrice, and with several other vivid personalities he meets along his way.

According to T.S. Eliot, “The whole study and practice of Dante seems to me to teach that the poet should be the servant of his language, rather than the master of it.” Join us in reading one of the classics of world literature.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eleven meeting study (on Zoom) led by Sean Forester

Thursdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time)

1, 8, 15, 22, 29 October; 5, 12, 19 November; 3, 10, 17 December 2026 (N.B. no meeting on 26 November, Thanksgiving)

£440 for eleven two-hour meetings, to include opening notes and resources

Recommended edition: Dante’s Purgatorio, translated by Jean Hollander & Robert Hollander, ISBN: 978-0385497008

Organizer

Sean Forester

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Time

5 November 2026 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

12November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm19November 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm3December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm10December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm17December 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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Shakespeare's Sonnets - A Slow Read #14SINGLE SESSION STUDY, 5 NOVEMBER 2026, 6-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026thu05nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyPoetryVIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland

Event Details

This is the fourteenth in a series of single session studies on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Participants are welcome to join as few or many sessions as they please.

*Attributed to Parmigianino, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still.”

from Sonnet 104

Shakespeare’s sonnets have inspired, fascinated and disturbed readers for centuries. Full of mystery and imagination, they dazzle us even as they drive us mad: Who is the fair youth to whom so many of these sonnets are addressed? Who is the dark lady, the complex beloved of so many others? Who is the rival poet and what power does he possess? Are these lyric expressions of tortured love – among other themes – the key to understanding the mysterious life of Shakespeare, or are they not autobiographical at all?

Through close analysis and hands-on interpretive work, we will examine Shakespeare’s kaleidoscopic exploration of his speaker’s romantic and tortured feelings and experiences.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single two-hour meeting led by Dr Julie Sutherland on Zoom

Thursday 5 November 2026, 6.00 – 8.00 pm (GMT)

Session #14 – Sonnets 98,104 & 106

£30.00 for two-hour study

We are offering these self-contained, individual studies of Shakespeare’s sonnets in a workshop style setting. Over time we will cover a broad selection of the 154 sonnets that comprise Shakespeare’s celebrated sequence. Participants are invited to join as few or many sessions as they please.

Before the session, Julie Sutherland will send links to online versions or attach specific copies for discussion. It is highly recommended that you print these off before joining this hands-on session. If you have a printed edition, please also have it ready so we can consider variations between texts. Have a notebook and pencil on hand as well!

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

5 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

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Russian Short StoriesFOUR MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY ALISON CABLE, 5 - 26 NOVEMBER 20262026thu05nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByAlison Cable

Event Details

A close, contemplative reading of seven classic Russian short stories, guided by George Saunders’ provocative description of them in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain as “seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art — namely, to ask the big questions.”

What happens when we read these stories with that purpose in mind? We’ll consider questions of truth and love, how to live and how to make meaning within the solitary confinement of our mortality. Together, we’ll linger over the strange, precise worlds these writers have made—and see what their stories might still ask of us.

In this study, we will use the book as a background to our own reading, focusing on the stories themselves—by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol—while also drawing on Saunders’ insights as a backdrop to our discussions. Rather than analysing his commentary in detail, we will engage directly with these literary masterpieces, exploring their themes, techniques and enduring relevance.

JOINING DETAILS:

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, ISBN 978-1526624246 is a required text for this study

Four-week study on Zoom led by Alison Cable

Thursdays, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

5, 12, 19, 26 November 2026

£140 to include introductory notes and resources

Organizer

Alison Cable

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Time

5 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

12November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm19November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm26November 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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Lolita by Vladimir NabokovEIGHT MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 17 SEPTEMBER - 5 NOVEMBER2026thu05nov6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein

Event Details

Now more than ever it seems right to read Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita (1955). The man who famously described himself as “an American writer, born in Russia” understands his adopted country as only an immigrant can.

Born into Russian nobility, Nabokov fled for his life twice: first escaping the 1917 Revolution for Berlin and Paris, and then, in 1940, fleeing Nazi-era Paris for New York City alongside his Jewish wife, Véra. A respected lepidopterist, Nabokov spent years working at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The immigrant, the scientist and the novelist brought all he knew about camouflage, metamorphosis, mimicry, migration and classification to his writing.

Lolita combines Nabokov’s keen observations of the new, post-World War II superpower that was late 1940s America with his scalpel-like dexterity with the English language.

One of the world’s most banned books? Yes.

A savage send-up of a country awash in Norman Rockwell imagery and pop psychology? A land where clueless elites become intellectually complicit in a world that infantilises adults while sexualising children? Yes.

Narrated through the notoriously unreliable perspective of one Humbert Humbert, aka Paedophile-in-Chief? Yes.

Hilarious and infuriating by turns, but always mesmerising? Yes.

JOINING DETAILS:

Eight-meeting study led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

17 September – 5 November 2026

Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 pm (UK time)

£320 for eight two-hour meetings

Recommended edition The Annotated Lolita (Penguin Modern Classics, 2000): ISBN: 978-0141185040

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

5 November 2026 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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Wagner's Ring Cycle - An Introduction FOUR MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY SEAN FORESTER WITH RICHARD FOX, 8 - 29 NOVEMBER 20262026sun08nov5:45 pm8:15 pm5:45 pm - 8:15 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyMusicLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySean Forester

Event Details

*JMW Turner, Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – The Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (1843). Tate Britain, London, Public Domain.*

The Ring of the Nibelung is one of the great artworks of the western tradition. It is a modern epic that explores the corrupting influence of power and wealth, and the resulting conflicts between love, jealousy and greed.

Wagner remains highly influential and controversial; his operas continue to raise strong feelings both pro and contra. The Royal Opera at Covent Garden are in the midst of building a new Ring Cycle: Götterdämmerung will be performed for the end of January 2027, and it is anticipated that performances of the complete cycle will take place in autumn 2027.

The London Literary Salon will take this opportunity to study Wagner’s epic music drama in depth. We will begin this autumn with an introductory salon on the cycle as a whole and Wagner’s methods. The Ring comprises four separate operas (Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried and Götterdämmerung) and when performed as a cycle is 15 hours in length, taking place over four evenings in the space of a week. Wagner’s literary sources were The Nibelungenlied, a German medieval epic poem and Scandinavian/Icelandic sagas of the Norse gods: The Prose Edda, The Poetic Edda and the Völsunga Saga.

In our Tristan and Isolde study last year we discussed Wagner’s medieval sources as literary works in their own right, and then looked at the opera. After receiving positive feedback, we are taking the same approach to The Ring. In 2027 the we will offer studies on The Nibelungenlied, The Prose Edda and The Poetic Edda, as well as listening sessions for The Ring Cycle. We invite you to join a group of interested Salonistas to experience this great artwork together. No background in music education is necessary. Our first Salon study,The Ring Cycle: An Introduction, will be structured in four parts:

Session 1 – The Story

We will cover the plot for the whole cycle and consider Wagner’s poetic and dramatic methods.

Session 2 – The Music

We will explore the nature of the music and musical methods, with an introduction to the main leitmotifs and some of the ‘highlights’ from the cycle.

Session 3 – The Philosophy

We will review the transition from revolutionary politics to the philosophy of Schopenhauer and its relevance to music and tragedy. This session will also continue the discussion of music from the previous meeting.

Session 4 – The Performance

We will consider the idea of a ‘total work of art’ and present an overview of different ways in which the ring cycle has been interpreted and staged. We will also discuss recordings and filmed productions that participants may wish to consider.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Sean Forester with Salonista and Wagner enthusiast Richard Fox

Sundays, 8-29 November 2026, 5.45-8.15 pm (UK time)

Recommended text: Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung: A Companion, Stewart Spencer & Barry Millington (authors/translators/editors)

£200 for four 2.5 hour meetings, to include background notes and resources

Organizer

Sean Forester

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Time

8 November 2026 5:45 pm - 8:15 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

15November 5:45 pm - 8:15 pm22November 5:45 pm - 8:15 pm29November 5:45 pm - 8:15 pm

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All places are booked

Bartleby, the Scrivener - A LitSalon ShortSINGLE SESSION LITSALON SHORT, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 NOVEMBER, 5.00-6.30 PM (UK TIME)2026thu12nov5:00 pm6:30 pm5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiterature, LitSalon ShortLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein

Event Details

Thomas_Patch_-_A_Young_Man_Seated_at_a_Desk_Writing_a_Letter_-_B1977.14.309(6)_-_Yale_Center_for_British_Art

Drawing by Thomas Patch, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

“I’m posting this LitSalon Short as a ‘taster’ for anyone considering joining me for the ten-meeting study of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, starting 14 January 2027, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time). Participants will also get a feel for my facilitation style.”

Nancy Goldstein

In this LitSalon Short we’ll be discussing Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853), one of the strangest and most haunting stories in American literature. Published in the same year as Bleak House, it echoes many of the themes in Charles Dickens’ novel.

A law office. A copyist who responds to every request with “I would prefer not to.” A system that cannot process a human being who simply stops complying.

Or can it? Melville’s central joke — that a man who does nothing is more destabilising than a man who does harm — is both absurd and completely logical. The story asks, with a perfectly straight face, what happens when a human being falls through the cracks of every institutional net designed to catch him.

As for Bleak House. Dickens’ masterpiece has at its centre Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a suit in Chancery that has consumed fortunes, ruined lives, and become its own self-perpetuating institution — a monument to procedural delay so vast and so perfectly constructed that it requires no villain to sustain it. The thematic overlap with Bartleby is exact: the way bureaucratic logic defeats human agency without anyone being visibly responsible. Dickens knew that the cruellest thing a corrupt system can do is not to break its own rules. It’s to follow them perfectly.

Our ten-meeting study of Bleak House begins on Thursday 14 January 2027.

JOINING DETAILS:

Single session LitSalon Short on Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein. The story is available free online via the linked text above.

Thursday 12 November, 5.00–6.30 pm (UK time), live on Zoom

‘LitSalon Shorts’ are single-session studies (usually slightly shorter than a typical Salon study meeting) in which a facilitator shares with the wider Salon community their enthusiasm for an aspect of literature or culture.

Shorts are offered free of charge, but numbers are limited so please use the booking form below to reserve a place. Although there is no fee for this Short, Nancy asks you to consider making a donation — perhaps the price of your last G&T or flat white? — to José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen, which feeds hungry people in war and emergency zones all over the world, from Gaza and Ukraine to Pakistan and areas struggling with natural disasters.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

12 November 2026 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar WildeFOUR MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN, 12 NOVEMBER - 3 DECEMBER 20262026thu12nov6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein

Event Details

“. . . Unclean . . . spawned from the leprous literature of the French decadents — a poisonous book . . . ”

Anonymous review, London Daily Chronicle, 30 June 1890

“Dull and nasty . . . stupid and vulgar . . . immoral. It may be suggested that Wilde derives pleasure from treating a subject merely because it is disgusting.”

Samuel Henry Jeyes, The St. James Gazette, 24 June 1890

“The poor public, hearing from an authority so high as your own, that this is a wicked book that should be coerced and suppressed by a Tory Government, will, no doubt, rush to it and read it. But, alas, they will find that it is a story with a moral. And the moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own punishment. ”

Oscar Wilde, from his response to the St. James Gazette review, 25 June 1890

Joseph Marshall Stoddart, Oscar Wilde’s editor in the Philadelphia offices of Lippincott’s Magazine, was neither a bumpkin nor a prude: in 1882 he arranged for Wilde to visit Walt Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, during his American visit. But, alarmed by material he feared readers would find “offensive”, and unbeknownst to its author until after publication, Stoddart went through Wilde’s original manuscript, pencil in hand, crossing out some 500 words to render it “acceptable to the most fastidious taste.”

In short, the novel that Wilde’s irate fin de siècle reviewers deemed filth was already a bowdlerised version of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

The contemporary reader, fresh from watching the latest episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race, may struggle to understand the fury that The Picture of Dorian Gray unleashed in the 1890s. Or the stench it carried for decades after, having starred as Exhibit A in Wilde’s 1895 trials for “gross indecency”.

One hundred and thirty-six years on, The Picture of Dorian Gray speaks to our moment with uncanny precision.

Dorian Gray’s portrait — polished, static, forever young while its subject rots — anticipates the curated profile picture, the Zoom filter, the gap between the life performed online and the life actually lived. In an era of Botox and doom scrolling, instant gratification and weekly scandal, Wilde’s central question feels less like Victorian Gothic and more like Monday morning: what are we willing to sacrifice — integrity, authenticity, other people — to keep the image intact?

Wilde knew, long before Instagram did, that the real corruption isn’t the sins you commit; it’s the lengths you’ll go to make sure nobody sees them.

This study will use, as its basic text, The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, published by the Harvard University Press (2012).

JOINING DETAILS:

Four-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 (UK time), 12 November – 3 December

HIGHLY recommended edition: The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray: A Reader’s Edition ISBN: 9780674066311

£160.00 for four two-hour meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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Time

12 November 2026 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

19November 6:30 pm26November 6:30 pm3December 6:30 pm

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All places are booked

THE SOUND AND THE FURY - WILLIAM FAULKNERFIVE MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM - THE THIRD IN OUR 'FAULKNER AND HIS CHILDREN' SERIES, 16 NOVEMBER - 14 DECEMBER2026mon16nov5:30 pm7:45 pm5:30 pm - 7:45 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureVIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByToby Brothers & John Allemand

Event Details

“I seemed to be lying neither asleep nor awake looking down a long corridor of gray half light where all stable things had become shadowy paradoxical all I had done shadows all I had felt suffered taking visible form antic and perverse mocking without relevance inherent themselves with the denial of the significance they should have affirmed thinking I was I was not who was not was not who.”

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

In William Faulkner’s first truly modernist work, he attempts to break through the confines of time and sequence to get at the essence of human nature. As Malcolm Bradbury explains, “Faulkner’s preoccupation with time has to do with the endless interlocking of personal and public histories and with the relation of the past to the lost, chaotic present.” The Sound and the Fury exposes a crumbling world through inference and allusion rather than using direct social critique. In the modernist method, Faulkner employs stream of consciousness and symbolism as connecting fibres against individual interior realities that must compete for authority.

This study – the third in our ‘Faulkner and his children’ series – will draw upon participants’ questions and ideas to shed light on this complex text. The book is richer when discussed, enabling the first time reader to access Faulkner’s vision, while those re-reading will find greater depth and resonance. Upon a first reading, the narratives appear jumbled and opaque; but as the pieces start to fit together, the complex and careful planning that Faulkner employs becomes apparent. Does the work expose the depths and hidden realms of the human spirit? This is what we must grapple with in our study.

JOINING DETAILS:

Led by Toby Brothers & John Allemand live on Zoom

Monday evenings 5.30 – 7.45 pm (UK time)

Five-meeting study 16 November – 14 December 2026

Recommended edition: The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, Norton Critical Edition (edited by Michael Gorra); ISBN-13: 978-0393912692

£250 for five meeting study with two facilitators (11.25 hours in total)

Organizer

Toby Brothers & John Allemand

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Time

16 November 2026 5:30 pm - 7:45 pm(GMT+00:00)

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VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

23November 5:30 pm - 7:45 pm30November 5:30 pm - 7:45 pm7December 5:30 pm - 7:45 pm14December 5:30 pm - 7:45 pm

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Gilgamesh - an introductionSINGLE SESSION LITSALON SHORT, LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST LIVE ON ZOOM,2026tue17nov6:00 pm7:30 pm6:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst

Event Details

As the Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, publishes his new translation of Gilgamesh we are offering a single-session LitSalon Short on the significance of the world’s oldest surviving work of great literature. Tim Swinglehurst will lead the study as an introduction to a fuller exploration of Gilgamesh in 2027.

Originating in the civilisation of Ancient Mesopotamia nearly 4,000 years ago, Gilgamesh deals with themes of power, loyalty, love and loss that remain entirely relevant to today’s very different world. Powerful storytelling is to the fore as we follow the eponymous demigod on his desperate quest for immortality . . .

We will compare and contrast Simon Armitage’s new version of Gilgamesh with Andrew George’s celebrated 2003 translation of the world’s earliest known epic poem. How does a 21st century poet breathe fresh life and energy into this tale of high adventure, duty and the eternal fear of death?

JOINING DETAILS:

Single session LitSalon Short led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom

Tuesday 17 November, 6.00-7.30 pm (UK time)

Recommended text: Simon Armitage’s new verse translation of Gilgamesh, ISBN: 978-0571357246, will be published by Faber on 8 October 2026. The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by Andrew George, Penguin Classics, ISBN-13 : ‎ 978-0140449198 is not required but may be useful.

LitSalon shorts are offered free of charge, but please register for the limited number of places available using the form below.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

17 November 2026 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Christopher Marlowe: The Seduction of Leander2026tue24nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyPoetryLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst

Event Details

*Nicolas Régnier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“With that he stripped him to the ivory skin,

And crying, ‘Love, I come,’ leapt lively in.”

At the time of his violent and mysterious death in 1593, Christopher Marlowe left unfinished a long narrative poem based on the Greek myth of Hero and Leander. The story tells of two lovers separated by the waters of the Hellespont. Nightly, Leander swims across the sea to “dally” with his beloved. Yet, one night, things do not go as he had planned.

In this one-off Salon we will undertake a close reading of about forty lines of Marlowe’s poem. We will take up the story where Leander leaps into the Hellespont, but on the night when, rather than reaching the further shore, he attracts the attention of the sea god, Neptune . . .

In this poem Marlowe showcases the poetic form, the deceptively simple rhyming couplets, which (in the words of David Riggs, Marlowe’s biographer) reproduced in English “the elegance and wit of Ovid’s love poetry”. We will read and re-read these forty lines, examining the linguistic virtuosity and rhetorical skill which Marlowe employs to dazzling effect, to capture those moments when powerful divinity meets frail humanity, when the beauty of corporeal movement blends with erotic desire in the depths of the ocean. Together we will try to tease out what makes these lines some of the most sensual and playful in English verse, while not neglecting the poem’s unsettling undercurrents in which a mighty hunter ensnares his vulnerable prey.

“Leander strived, the waves about him wound,

And pulled him to the bottom, where the ground

Was strewed with pearl, and in low coral groves

Sweet singing mermaids sported with their loves…”

JOINING DETAILS:

Single-session study, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst

Tuesday 24 November, 6.00-8.00pm (UK time)

Tim will provide participants with the relevant text

£35.00 for two-hour meeting

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

24 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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Sir Gawain and the Green KnightFOUR MEETINGS, LIVE ON ZOOM, 25 NOVEMBER - 16 DECEMBER 2026, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2026wed25nov6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiterature, PoetryLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst

Event Details

*Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“This kyng lay at Camylot upon Cristmasse,
With rich revel aright and rechlesse mirthes.”

It was Christmas at Camelot and the long fifteen-day celebrations of feasting, dancing and playing games were in full swing at the court of King Arthur when suddenly, at new year, a mysterious knight (“overal enker grene” – entirely vivid green) appears. The stranger issues a challenge to the king’s knights: he will withstand any blow from any knight, provided that in a year and a day’s time the Green Knight may return the blow. When Sir Gawain takes up this challenge and strikes off the Green Knight’s head, he unleashes a series of events which threaten not only his knighthood and the raison d’être of Arthur’s court but disturb his understanding of himself and the world he inhabits.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a perfect read for the winter season, as Gawain sets off at in November to seek out the Green Knight and receive the return-blow. He travels through snow-bound landscapes, where cold streams come clattering down from cliff-tops and hang high above his head in hard icicles, and un-blithe birds upon bare twigs piteously pipe at the pain of the cold, a cold which the poet counterpoints with the warmth of hospitality and festivity celebrated in the castle where Gawain finds rest over Christmas before his final confrontation with the Green Knight.

On the surface, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight appears to be a simple story of magic and adventure, but it is recognised as a great masterpiece of medieval literature, exhibiting keen and subtle psychological depth, and displaying rich and intricate literary artistry. Join us to journey with Gawain as he navigates the cold of winter, the otherness of the Green Knight and his other-worlds, and the complexities of medieval courtly love and fidelity.

The medieval English dialect of the poem is not straightforward. For this study we will be using the acclaimed translation into modern English by poet laureate Simon Armitage, with occasional forays into the original Middle English. The recommended edition is Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007. ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four meeting study led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom

Wednesday 25 November, 2, 9 &16 December, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£160 for four meetings, to include background materials and resources

Recommended edition: Simon Armitage, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Faber & Faber, 2007, ISBN 978-0-571-22328-2.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

25 November 2026 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

2December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm9December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm16December 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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January 2027

Paradise Lost, Book 2: A Slow ReadFOUR MEETING STUDY LED BY JULIE SUTHERLAND LIVE ON ZOOM, 5 - 26 JANUARY 2027, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2027tue05jan6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland

Event Details

*William Blake, The Casting of the Rebel Angels into Hell, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons*

‘Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven’

Join Dr. Julie Sutherland in an engaging and rewarding study of Book II of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, the second standalone study in a slow read through the 17th-century writer and rebel’s great epic. In this gripping section of Milton’s cinematic retelling of the fall of Lucifer and humankind, readers experience a clamouring debate in Pandemonium (a word coined by the poet himself) as the fallen angels recalibrate in Hell.

This immersive study is structured as a shared reading experience, where participants will read every line of the fascinating book aloud, pausing regularly for discussion. Along the way, we will explore Milton’s portrayal of Satan and the fallen angels, the epic’s opening vision of Hell, and some of the poem’s central themes, including freedom, rebellion, authority and ambition.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four-meeting study led by Dr Julie Sutherland live on Zoom

Tuesdays, 5 – 26 January 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£160.00 for four meetings

We will use the Penguin Classics edition: Paradise Lost by John Milton, edited by John Leonard (ISBN-10: ‎ 9780140424393)

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

5 January 2027 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

12January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm19January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm26January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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'Tis Pity She's a Whore - John FordSEVEN-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY DR JULIE SUTHERLAND, 6 JANUARY - 17 FEBRUARY 20272027wed06jan5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland

Event Details

Written just three decades after Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, John Ford’s (1586 – circa 1639) provocative and psychologically penetrating tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore enters into a striking conversation with that earlier tragedy. Both plays explore forbidden love, divided loyalties, family conflict, secrecy, and the destructive consequences of a society that cannot accommodate the desires of its young.

Yet where Shakespeare often places passionate lovers within a world of feuding families and social constraint, Ford turns our attention even more intensely inward. What happens when desire becomes inseparable from obsession? How do guilt, fantasy, self-deception and the longing for absolute emotional union shape human behaviour?

Join Dr Julie Sutherland in this seven-week study, where we will explore Ford’s acute insight into the inner workings of the human mind, as well as his capacity to animate those dark interior places where love, desire, conscience and reason collide.

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Julie Sutherland

Wednesdays, 6 January to 17 February, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time)

Recommended edition: ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore by John Ford, edited by Sonia Massai, Arden Early Modern Drama, ISBN: 978-1904271505

£245 for seven two-hour meetings, to include background notes and resources

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

6 January 2027 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

13January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm20January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm27January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm3February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm10February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm17February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm

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Homeric GreekBLOCK 1 OF 3: 10 MEETINGS LEARNING TO READ HOMERIC GREEK, LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST LIVE ON ZOOM, 10 JANUARY - 14 MARCH 20272027sun10jan4:00 pm5:30 pm4:00 pm - 5:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyClassicalLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst

Event Details

Pottery Fan: photo of greek art created about 500 BC by Douris, via Wikimedia Commons

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
Driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
The hallowed heights of Troy.”

The opening lines of The Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles

“Achilles’ wrath, to Greece the direful spring
Of woes unnumber’d, heavenly goddess sing!”

The opening lines of The Iliad, translated by Alexander Pope

The stunning grandeur of Christopher Nolan’s film The Odyssey has provoked extraordinary interest in Homer’s epic: sales of translations are up manyfold.

We in the London Literary Salon are no strangers to the poem which, along with its sister epic The Iliad, has been the subject of many studies, recently in translations by Robert Fagles, Emily Wilson and Daniel Mendelsohn. If you have ever wondered what it may be like to read these great epics in the original language, now is your opportunity to find out!

Starting in January 2027, we are offering a course in Homeric Greek, consisting of three sets of 10 ninety minute sessions spread out over the year. Led by Tim Swinglehurst, our aim will be to read (however slowly) through as much of the first book of The Iliad as possible – a very good place to start reading through Homer! As Clyde Pharr (who wrote Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners) has said, the student who achieves a read-through of The Iliad Book 1 “has come into vital contact with the magic and music of the Greek language, used in one of the most beautiful, one of the most varied, and one of the most influential compositions of all ages”.

In that first book we will leap into the explosive argument between Achilles and Agamemnon which, in its intensity and ferocity, places the nine-year conflict between Greeks and Trojans very much into the shade; we will stand upon the shore of the “wine-dark sea” to share in the moving encounter between Thetis, tender and compassionate mother, and Achilles, enflamed but tearful son; finally, we will take our seats on Mount Olympus to view the eternal bickering and eternal feastings of the eternal gods.

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

οὐλομένην, ἣ μυρί’ Ἀχαιοῖς ἄλγε’ ἔθηκε.

“Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,

Murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses.”

The opening lines of The Iliad, translated by Robert Fagles

JOINING DETAILS:

A series of three ten-meeting studies, each session 90 minutes, led by Tim Swinglehurst live on Zoom.

Block 1: Sundays 4.00-5.30 pm (UK time), 10 January – 14 March 2027 (please note that we may make one Sunday a break and extend the run to 21 March if all participants agree).

£100 for ten-meetings (£10.00 per 90 minute session).

Required text: Homeric Greek: A Book for Beginners (Fourth Edition) by Clyde Pharr, revised by John Wright and Paula Debnar, University of Oklahoma Press, ISBN: ‎978-0806141640.

On Sunday 11 October, 4.00-5.00 pm (UK time), we are offering an introductory session on Zoom for registrants and we will follow up with one or two more sessions before Christmas. We are encouraging participants to learn the alphabet as soon as possible (especially the lower case letters) and to begin to read some Greek words aloud ahead of the start of the study. We will provide more information and resources to participants on registration.

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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Time

10 January 2027 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

17January 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm24January 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm31January 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm7February 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm14February 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm21February 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm28February 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm7March 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm14March 20274:00 pm - 5:30 pm

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A Mercy - Toni MorrisonPART OF OUR 'FAULKNER AND HIS CHILDREN SERIES': FOUR MEETING STUDY, 11 JANUARY - 1 FEBRUARY 2027, 5.30-7.30 PM (UK TIME)2027mon11jan5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureVIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Deborah Lawunmi

Event Details

“I am nothing to you. You say I am wilderness. I am. Is that a tremble on your mouth, in your eye? Are you afraid? You should be.”

Toni Morrison, A Mercy

Toni Morrison explained that she wrote A Mercy to explore a time before slavery was identified with race. This may help readers to consider race more as described here:

“an interplay with other social determiners, such as gender and class. Moreover, we must resist the trigger reaction that interprets ‘race’ to reference black-white relations, given that in colonial America another different people lived here who were subjected to biological mayhem as well as painstakingly plotted genocide.”

From the introduction to Critical Approaches: Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, edited by Shirley A. Stave and Justine Tally

Differing perspectives and narrative styles tell the story. As we read, we notice how the land—the specific geographical settings—impact character and tellings; we also see different paradigms: for example, what is ownership to one character is something different to another . . .

A Mercy is a study of displaced peoples. Instead of focusing on (and singling out) the experience of Black Americans, Morrison chooses a moment in the history of the United States—in the moment before this land comes to be called the United States—and explores the lives of the collection of people creating a home in wilderness. These ideas are connected to post-colonial theory, race issues and immigrant cultural adaptations, but perhaps what is new in our understanding today is how prevalent and constant the loss of home is for peoples across history.

We may each experience aspects of displacement in our own lives, and this may open us to a kind of understanding—but I believe through literature—the carefully evoked experience of others—we may start to understand with greater complexity the precarious experience of the displaced identity—and the strategies and creativity one uses to respond to this upheaval.

For anyone who has read Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, A Mercy is in part Morrison’s response to that explosive text.

JOINING DETAILS:

Four week study on Zoom, facilitated by Toby Brothers and Deborah Lawunmi

Mondays, 11 January – 1 February 2027, 5.30 – 7.30 pm (UK)

£160 for four meetings with two facilitators (includes notes and critical resources)

Recommended edition: A Mercy by Toni Morrison, Vintage, ISBN-13: 978-0099502548

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers & Deborah Lawunmi

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Time

11 January 2027 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

18January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm25January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm1February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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The Art of the Venetian RenaissanceSIX-MEETING STUDY LED BY SEAN FORESTER, LIVE ON ZOOM, MONDAYS, 11, 18, 25 JANUARY, 1,9, 22 FEBRUARY, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2027mon11jan6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyArt, MusicLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySean Forester

Event Details

Discover the colourful, sensual and spiritual world of the Venetian Renaissance. In contrast to the linear style of the Florentines, Venetian painters emphasised light and colour. Venice was a crossroads of East and West, with trade that brought a variety of dyes and pigments such as Ultramarine (literally translated as “beyond the sea” ) which the Venetians used for their rich textiles and great oil paintings in churches and palazzos.

In this Salon study we will trace the development of painting in 16th-century Venice — Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. We will also look at the city itself, with its unique combination of Gothic and Classical architecture — the Gothic grandeur of San Marco and the Ca d’Oro beside Palladio’s grand churches San Giorgiore Maggiore and Il Redentore. Finally, we will explore the music of Claudio Monteverdi, opera’s first master — we will listen to and discuss some of his madrigals and selections from L’Orfeo.

Over six meetings we will cover the following artists and subjects:

1. Bellini; Giorgione
2. Titian I; Carpaccio
3. Titian II
4. Tintoretto; Veronese
5. Architecture – Ruskin, Palladio
6. Music – Monteverdi

JOINING DETAILS:

Six meetings led by Sean Forester live on Zoom

Mondays, 11 January – 22 February 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK). Please note, NO meeting on Monday 15 February.

Sean Forester will provide a Padlet showing the artworks

Recommended (but not required) reading:
Painting in Renaissance Venice by Peter Humfrey, ISBN: 978-0300067156
Venice: Art & Architecture by Marion Kaminski, ISBN: ‎ 978-3848003235

£240 for six meetings

Organizer

Sean Forester

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Time

11 January 2027 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

18January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm25January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm1February 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm8February 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm22February 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE (2027 early)21 MEETINGS, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 JANUARY - 15 JUNE 2027, 12.00 - 2.00PM (UK TIME)2027tue12jan12:00 pm2:00 pm12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureVIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByToby Brothers

Event Details

In the more than 100 years since it was first published on 2 February 1922 – James Joyce’s 40th birthday – Ulysses has sometimes been described as ‘unreadable’ and is frequently listed as ‘the book I’m ashamed (or regretful) not to have read’. And yet it came in at number 3 in the Guardian’s recent list of The 100 Best Novels of All Time and at number 10 in the follow-up Readers’ top 100 novels of all time. It is now 20 years since Salon founder Toby Brothers first led a group reading this extraordinary and challenging work, and in 2027 we are again offering the opportunity to join her in guiding a group of committed and curious readers through the pages. Join us if you can, and bear in mind the words of the great American novelist William Faulkner:

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”

*Portrait of James Joyce by Jacques-Emile Blanche, 1934, National Gallery of Ireland, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.*

“. . . Joyce’s contribution to a new way of writing particularly as it affects narrative theory, the role of the reader, and how stories are told from inside the consciousness of the individual. So both the external world we associate with history and the internal world that rightly belongs to the private world of consciousness are redrawn by Joyce in a manner that is both original and at times dependent on sources outside the novel.”

David Pierce in Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading

Widely acknowledged today as one of the greatest novels of all time, UIysses was immediately controversial on publication, described by one Irish critic as “The most infamously obscene book in ancient or modern literature”. Our study is suitable both for people who have not yet entered the pages of Ulysses and those who have already read it at least once. Our work with this book will widen your perspective and deepen your experience of the power of language.

There are many good reasons for studying this huge and sometimes intimidating text, but you will only know for yourself by diving in. Toby believes the best way to study it is with a group of hungry, curious fellow readers who all contribute to evoking meaning through their questions and insights, she explains:

“The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing – even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man. Thank you James Joyce.”

Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader – a broader thinker – even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.

Here are comments from two Ulysses participants:

“I am thoroughly enjoying this journey. I feel wide open, exposed and receptive to new ways of thinking. What could be better than that? I enjoy the links with the classics and their current counterparts such as the agony of Sisyphus and the trials of thoughtful, surely sad, Martin Cunningham. And then Bloom with his many pockets reminded me in an amusing way of the Artful Dodger.

“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skilfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvellous work was immense.“

JOINING DETAILS:

We are offering this study from 12.00 – 2.00 pm (UK time) with an alternative option later in the day (5.30 – 7.30 pm)

The study will comprise 21 meetings led by Toby Brothers starting on Tuesday 12 January and finishing on Tuesday 15 June 2027, with four possible Sunday afternoon meetings (4.30-6.30pm on 31 January, 28 February, 14 March and 30 May) and NO meetings on 4 and 11 May.

The total cost for the 21 meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £575

Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:
- Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition, Penguin Modern Classics 2011, ISBN: 9780141197418. There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.
- The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

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Time

12 January 2027 12:00 pm - 2:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

19January 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm26January 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm2February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm9February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm16February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm23February 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm2March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm9March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm16March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm23March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm30March 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm6April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm13April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm20April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm27April 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm18May 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm25May 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm1June 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm8June 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm15June 202712:00 pm - 2:00 pm

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The Portrait of a Lady - Henry JamesEIGHT-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 JANUARY - 2 MARCH 2027, 5.00-7.00 PM (UK TIME)2027tue12jan5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByKeith Fosbrook & Sarah Snoxall

Event Details

According to writer and academic Michael Gorra, author of Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, this is the novel in which Henry James first allowed his imagination full stretch. It was certainly his first big success and remains the most popular of all his longer works.

The Portrait of a Lady tells the story of Isabel Archer, a young American woman arriving in Europe with money, independence and a determination to “see life”. She is intelligent, self-confident, perceptive and curious, even though some find her presumptuous and naive! In James’ own words, he is writing about ‘a certain young woman confronting her destiny’.

For most young women in the 1880s that destiny centred on marriage. At the start of the book, it looks as if Isabel is about to accept this by marrying a forceful, prosperous young man in New England, but when this is postponed by an aunt whisking her off to Europe it seems to open up a world of possibilities curiously attractive to Isabel, in much the same way as visiting Europe proved irresistible for Henry James himself.

Henry James seems to identify deeply with the character of Isabel. In his prelude to the book, he quotes George Eliot’s words about young women, ‘In these frail vessels is borne onward through the ages the treasure of human affection’. His admiration for Eliot and his own inclinations clearly combine to lead him to centre his story on a female character, and to raise fundamental questions about what possibilities there are for women to act independently. He probes the influential Emersonian vision of untrammelled self-reliance, inviting us to consider the extent to which a woman can create her own life when convention offers no more than a frame into which she can step, to become an agreeable but mute and unchanging portrait.

In the context of literary history, this novel is often seen as a link between George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, a kind of bridge between Victorian fiction and modernism. This applies to both content and form, as the novel focuses on the drama of the interior life and, according to Michael Gorra, offers ‘the most searching account of the moment-by-moment flow of consciousness that any novelist had yet attempted’.

For all the possibilities of intellectual engagement with the book, we should never forget the power it has to make us believe in, care for and be deeply moved by the troubled life of the central character. Isabel hopes for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but Henry James’ novels always warn us of the difficulty of achieving these goals in the face of the powerful influence on human affairs of money and deceit. There are elements of the fairy tale in this novel, but don’t expect it to have a happy ending.

JOINING DETAILS:

8 meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Keith Fosbrook and Sarah Snoxall

Tuesdays, 12 January – 2 March 2027, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time)

Recommended edition: The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James, edited by Michael Gorra, Norton Critical Edition, ISBN: 978-0393938531

£320 for eight two-hour meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Keith Fosbrook & Sarah Snoxall

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Time

12 January 2027 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

19January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm26January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm2February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm9February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm16February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm23February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm2March 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm

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All places are booked

ULYSSES BY JAMES JOYCE (2027 late)21 MEETINGS, LED BY TOBY BROTHERS LIVE ON ZOOM, 12 JANUARY - 15 JUNE 2027, 5.30 - 7.30PM (UK TIME)2027tue12jan5:30 pm7:30 pm5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureVIRTUAL - ON ZOOM Event Organized ByToby Brothers

Event Details

“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”

“. . . Joyce’s contribution to a new way of writing particularly as it affects narrative theory, the role of the reader, and how stories are told from inside the consciousness of the individual. So both the external world we associate with history and the internal world that rightly belongs to the private world of consciousness are redrawn by Joyce in a manner that is both original and at times dependent on sources outside the novel.”

David Pierce in Joyce’s Portrait: A New Reading

“The good news: reading Ulysses is fun. And I don’t mean in a frustrating, overly-analytical see-how-much-you-know-way. The language is amazing – even when I don’t understand it. Perhaps, especially when I don’t understand it, because meaning sneaks in through more than my critical faculty. Meaning slides in through sound, through the lushness of the language, through the filmy and substantial images, and suddenly I find myself transported from a walk on a beach to a contemplation of the origins of man. Thank you James Joyce.”

Any time spent studying Joyce leaves one a better reader – a broader thinker – even if all the references, repetitions, epiphanies and allusions are not immediately understood.

Here are comments from two Ulysses participants:

“I am thoroughly enjoying this journey. I feel wide open, exposed and receptive to new ways of thinking. What could be better than that? I enjoy the links with the classics and their current counterparts such as the agony of Sisyphus and the trials of thoughtful, surely sad, Martin Cunningham. And then Bloom with his many pockets reminded me in an amusing way of the Artful Dodger.

“Joining the Ulysses salon was one of the best things I have ever done. This was a book I had wanted to read for years but never got past the first section. I had no idea what the salon would be like and was very apprehensive about joining up. But Toby so skilfully guided us through it, her knowledge of the text seemingly inexhaustible, that with her warmth and generosity and sensitivity she got everyone involved and the satisfaction of participating in the salon and in getting an understanding of this marvellous work was immense.“

JOINING DETAILS:

We are offering this study from 5.30 – 7.30 pm (UK time) with an alternative option earlier in the day (12.00-2.00 pm UK)

The study will comprise 21 meetings led by Toby Brothers starting on Tuesday 12 January and finishing on Tuesday 15 June 2027, with four possible Sunday afternoon meetings (4.30-6.30pm on 31 January, 28 February, 14 March and 30 May) and NO meetings on 4 and 11 May.

The total cost for the 21 meeting study, with all notes and resources materials, is £575

Please purchase these editions in preparation for our study:
- Ulysses, by James Joyce, Annotated Students’ Edition, Penguin Modern Classics 2011, ISBN: 9780141197418. There are many editions of Ulysses — I find this edition is most coherent and the notes and introduction by Declan Kieberd very helpful; as we will constantly be referencing particular passages, having the same edition will be extremely useful.
- The New Bloomsday Book: A Guide Through Ulysses, by Harry Blamires, ISBN-10: 0415138582

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

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12 January 2027 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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VIRTUAL - ON ZOOM

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19January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm26January 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm2February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm9February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm16February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm23February 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm2March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm9March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm16March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm23March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm30March 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm6April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm13April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm20April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm27April 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm18May 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm25May 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm1June 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm8June 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm15June 20275:30 pm - 7:30 pm

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The Iliad is one of the first written works in Western Literature, and undoubtedly one of the greatest. Although the story of its composition and recording remains a subject of scholarly debate, we can tentatively date it to the late 8^th or early 7^th Century BCE. It is impossible to overestimate The Iliad’s importance, which extends beyond literature to influence art, culture, society and morals – Alexander the Great carried the copy given to him by Aristotle on his campaigns and John Keats was inspired to write one of his most perfect sonnets after a night of reading.

The Iliad is a thrilling and heart-wrenching poem about war, human mortality and loss. But it is also about friendship, families, the natural world, love and redemption. One of the joys of the work, and perhaps why re-reading is so rewarding, is the richness and relatability of Homer’s world. Richness takes many forms, including a huge cast of characters, vivid language and similes, and how invested we become in this epic story. Homer invites us into a world that is both familiar and strange. The society is patriarchal, slave-holding, monarchical and polytheistic. The text is more than two and a half thousand years old, yet the characters speak directly to our own experience. Who hasn’t feared for a loved one? Or been mad at their boss (hopefully not enough to almost draw a sword against them)? Or wondered at the beauty of the sunrise?

Emily Wilson’s new translation of The Iliad was published to acclaim in 2023.

“Wilson’s approachable storytelling tone invites us in, only to startle us with eruptions of beauty . . . Wilson’s transformation of such a familiar and foundational work is astonishing.”

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, The Atlantic

Using iambic pentameter – the rhythm of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton – Wilson’s translation has the lyrical quality the Ancient Greeks would have experienced in a work so closely linked to performance. Her writing is brisk and readable, bringing a fresh perspective to an ancient tale.

We will combine a close reading of the text and bonus features: poems and art inspired by the epic, consideration of the psychology of war, and images of museum exhibits.

JOINING DETAILS:

Twelve two-hour meetings live on Zoom, led by Susanna Taggart and Caroline Hammond

Tuesdays, 5.30-7.30 pm (UK time), 12 January – 30 March 2027.

Optional one-hour session for final reflections on Tuesday 6 April.

We’ll use Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Iliad (ISBN-10: 1324076143 ; ISBN-13: 978-1324076148).

£480 for twelve meetings with two facilitators, to include opening notes and resources.

Organizer

Susanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond

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12 January 2027 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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The Things We Never Say - Elizabeth StroutTHREE MEETING STUDY LED BY JANE WYMARK LIVE ON ZOOM, 12-26 JANUARY, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2027tue12jan6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJane Wymark

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SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE FOR FICTION
THE WINNER WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN LONDON ON MONDAY 9 NOVEMBER 2026

This moving and deceptively understated book has at its core this assertion by its omniscient narrator:

‘So blind we humans are – so blind. To each other and to ourselves, moving through life as though through shadows, putting out a hand in the dark and thinking we have touched someone …But mostly we travel through life unsighted, grasping only the smallest details of one another’s selves, including our own.’

The central character of The Things We Never Say, Artie Dam, a high school teacher in coastal Maine, sees his comfortable, well-ordered world (albeit one with the distant braying sounds of the Trump presidency becoming more strident) begin to fracture: first slowly, then with increasing speed.

The book’s epigraph is taken from Jung:

‘Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.’

Elizabeth Strout is the Pulitzer prize-winning author of novels greatly admired for their profound and perceptive evocation of contemporary lives, including My Name is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge. Based in Maine, she has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times, as well as for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. The judges of the 2026 Booker Prize described The Things We Never Say as ‘A devastating look at the dangerous cracks in family life and in the contemporary world at large. Strout’s prose is brilliantly understated and all the more powerful for that’.

Over three meetings we will discuss how Strout weaves the themes of grief, isolation, love and friendship into a seemingly simple story that speaks to us all about the essence of what it is to be human in the twenty-first century.

JOINING DETAILS:

Three-meeting study led by Jane Wymark

Mondays, 12, 19 & 26 January 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£120.00 for three meetings, including background notes and resources

The Things We Never Say is published by Viking, ISBN: 9780241814307 (N.B. the paperback edition is not due for publication until June 2027)

Organizer

Jane Wymark

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12 January 2027 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

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19January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm26January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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“Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways
To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep;
Many the peoples whose cities he saw and whose ways of thinking he learned,
Many the toils he suffered at sea, anguish in his heart
As he struggled to safeguard his life and the homecoming of his companions.”

The opening lines of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey

“This may be the best translation of The Odyssey yet.”
Edith Hall, The Telegraph

Thanks to its enduring appeal, The Odyssey is perhaps Homer’s more famous work. It’s a collection of thrilling adventures, featuring our ‘hero’ pitted against fantastical monsters, seductive sorcerers, and the forces of nature. And The Odyssey is also a meditation on identity, homecoming, and finding one’s place in the world. Full of complex relationships and characters – including a wealth of female figures – the work explores the guest-host relationship and how we encounter and understand difference.

We’re delighted to offer a twelve-week study, covering two books per session, allowing time to look at the text from many angles: its historical context, the debates surrounding its authorship, its literary and psychological subtexts and its enduring influence on modern culture in the English-speaking world and beyond. We will combine a close reading of the text and a wider focus, including poems and art inspired by the epic, consideration of the psychology of war and return, and images of museum exhibits.

Published in 2025, the celebrated author, critic and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed translation has brought The Odyssey to new life. Readers have praised this line-for-line translation for capturing the epic’s formal qualities – meter, enjambment, alliteration and assonance – to produce a work full of the beauty and music of the original as well as its archaic grandeur.

Whether it’s your first reading or one of many, we hope you can join us to explore the complexity and difficulty of this central character and why the poem remains at the heart of our shared literary culture today.

JOINING DETAILS:

Twelve two-hour meetings live on Zoom, led by Susanna Taggart and Caroline Hammond.

Thursdays, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time), from 14 January to 1 April 2027.

Optional one-hour session for final reflections on Thursday 8 April.

Recommended edition: The Odyssey: A New Translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, Penguin Classics, ISBN-10: 0241733588, ISBN-13: 978-0241733585.

£480 for twelve meetings with two facilitators, to include opening notes and resources.

Organizer

Susanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond

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Time

14 January 2027 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

21January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm28January 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm4February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm11February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm18February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm25February 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm4March 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm11March 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm18March 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm25March 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm1April 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm

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Poet Tasting #2: Gerard Manley HopkinsTWO-MEETING STUDY, LED BY TIM SWINGLEHURST LIVE ON ZOOM, THURSDAY 14 & 21 JANUARY, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2027thu14jan6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByTim Swinglehurst

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*Gerard Manley Hopkins, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring . . .”

When Hopkins entered a religious order in 1868 he destroyed his poetry, but fortunately he continued to send poems to his friend Robert Bridges. When Bridges eventually published the poems in 1918, nearly 30 years after Hopkins’ death, he revealed to the world one of the most startling and innovative poetic voices of the 19^th century.

Hopkins’ poems explore intense emotion and the musicality of language; they are rich in alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia and rhyme, and exhibit Hopkins’ distinctive theories about rhythm and the energy of poetry. Many of his poems delight in the beauty and intricate detail of the natural world and the glorious singularity of birds and insects and human beings. Other poems, discovered after his death, grapple with questions of desolation, doubt and despair.

In this two-week salon, we will, among other brief extracts from Hopkins poetry, consider the particularity of place, person and profession in Duns Scotus’s Oxford and Felix Randal; watch what happens when kingfishers catch fire and dragonflies draw flame; and enter into a ‘dark and comfortless’ Sonnet of Desolation: No worst, there is none…).

“No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?”

JOINING DETAILS:

Two-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Tim Swinglehurst

Thursdays, 14 & 21 January 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£80 for 2 two-hour meetings

Recommended edition: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, selected and with an Introduction and Notes by W.H. Gardner, Penguin Books, 2008, ISBN-13: 978-0-140-42015-9. Tim will also send out links to the individual poems to be studied.

This salon will act as a taster for a more in-depth study of Hopkins’ poetry which Sean Forester will offer on Thursday 4, 11, 18 & 25 February, 6.00-8.00pm (UK time).

Organizer

Tim Swinglehurst

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14 January 2027 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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21January 20276:00 pm - 8:00 pm

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Bleak House - Charles DickensTEN MEETINGS, LED BY NANCY GOLDSTEIN LIVE ON ZOOM, 14 JANUARY - 18 MARCH 2027, 6.30-8.30PM (UK TIME)2027thu14jan6:30 pm8:30 pm6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00) Type of studyLiteratureLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByNancy Goldstein

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With Bleak House, Charles Dickens sharpened his satire to its finest point and never looked back. First published in monthly parts between 1852 and 1853, it is Gothic in atmosphere, labyrinthine in structure, and merciless in its central argument: that institutions designed to dispense justice can, given sufficient time and indifference, become engines of pure destruction.

At the heart of the novel sits Jarndyce and Jarndyce, a suit in Chancery — the English court of equity — that has been grinding through the system for so long that no living person can remember what it was originally about. It concerns an inheritance. Or several inheritances. Or possibly none at all. By the time we encounter it, the case has consumed fortunes, ruined lives, and become its own self-perpetuating institution: a monument to procedural delay so vast and so perfectly constructed that it requires no villain to sustain it. The system does that work entirely on its own.

Around this vortex, Dickens assembles one of the largest casts in English fiction. There is Esther Summerson, our narrator for half the novel — orphaned, self-effacing, unreliable in ways she cannot see, and, it is hard not to notice, rather more interested in Ada Clare than in any of the men who pursue her. There is Lady Dedlock, magnificent and glacial, with a secret that will undo her. There is Tulkinghorn, the family solicitor, a man who collects other people’s secrets the way other men collect art. There is Inspector Bucket, one of the first detectives in English literature, pursuing a truth that will satisfy no one. And there is Jo, the crossing-sweeper: a child who cannot read, does not know where he was born, and is moved on by every authority he encounters until there is nowhere left to move him.

The fog that opens the novel is Chancery made weather. Dickens’ critics considered the novel’s famous use of spontaneous combustion preposterous. He considered it a defensible metaphor. Both were right.

At a moment when courts are being asked to hold the line against executive power — and when the question of whether they can is genuinely open — Dickens’ portrait of a legal system that defeats justice through its own internal logic has never felt more urgent. Bleak House understands, with absolute clarity, how a system staffed by reasonable individuals and governed by elaborate rules can produce outcomes that are neither reasonable nor just. It understands how delay functions as a weapon. It understands how the people with the least recourse are the most reliably destroyed.

Dickens knew that the cruellest thing a corrupt system can do is not to break its own rules. It’s to follow them perfectly.

Let us read.

JOINING DETAILS:

Ten-meeting study, live on Zoom, led by Dr Nancy Goldstein

14 January – 18 March 2027

Thursdays, 6.30–8.30 pm (UK time)

£400 for ten two-hour meetings

Recommended edition: Bleak House, Oxford World’s Classics, edited with an introduction and notes by Stephen Gill, ISBN: 9780199536313.

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.

Organizer

Nancy Goldstein

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14 January 2027 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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21January 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm28January 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm4February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm11February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm18February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm25February 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm4March 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm11March 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm18March 20276:30 pm - 8:30 pm

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February 2027

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu - Part 1: The Shining PrinceELEVEN-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, LED BY LEWIS WARD & ALEXIS CAMBANIS, 2 FEBRUARY - 20 APRIL 20272027tue02feb7:30 pm9:30 pm7:30 pm - 9:30 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByLewis Ward & Alexis Cambanis

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‘Both epic and intimate . . . a gorgeous evocation of a time and place that have long since disappeared. But it’s also an exploration of feelings and relations between men and women, as fresh and beguiling to readers today as when it was first written.’

Wall Street Journal

‘The only Western book that The Tale of Genji reminds me of is Marcel Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu … The theme of both novels is the splendour and decay of an aristocratic society, and in both, the nobility are mentioned less for their hunting and fishing than for their outstanding musical talent, brilliant conversation and infallible taste.’

Donald Keene

‘An astonishingly rich, absorbing drama that has stood, and will doubtless continue to stand, the severest tests of time and changing literary fashions.’

Kirkus Reviews

Composed in the early eleventh century, The Tale of Genji is often called the world’s first novel. The author, Murasaki Shikibu, was a ranking noblewoman serving as one of many ladies-in-waiting at court in the city now known as Kyōto during the height of Japan’s Heian Period (794-1185).

Murasaki was unusual for women of her time in that she received an excellent literary education from her father, himself a poet and scholar, but even so, her achievement over the 54 chapters of the Tale is stupendous. Though the Tale is a work of fiction, the author was a tutor and companion to an Empress, which provided her with unique access to life in the Japanese imperial palace. By sharply observing the lives of the aristocracy, she offers biting satire of their foibles and hypocrisies while affirming the aesthetic, moral and religious values of a society very different from our own. Her sensitive insights into the psychology of her peers create an arresting portrait of the human condition as relevant today as it was when it was written a thousand years ago.

The eponymous hero is an Emperor’s son by a lower-ranking wife who dies soon after his birth. His father gives him a surname, ‘Genji’, or ‘member of Minamoto clan’, which makes him not a prince but a commoner – though a privileged one. Genji is thus destined to lose both his mother and his birthright to power, both of which he will search for throughout his life. As a youth of exceptional beauty, charm and creative gifts, this search will involve many adventures and some questionable encounters with women . . .

The role of an outsider in politics and the myriad forms of love experienced by our hero are just some of the riveting themes we will discuss during our voyage through this ancient yet relatable work. We will explore what this thousand-year old text can teach us about human relationships and desires, dreams and aging, and memory and identity.

For this study we will use the acclaimed 2001 translation by Royall Tyler, published by Penguin in a handsome edition with illustrations, maps, character lists, a glossary and much more. We will also refer to Melissa McCormick’s beautiful volume The Tale of Genji: A Visual Companion (Princeton University Press, 2018), which reproduces many of the artworks inspired by the Tale and helps to illuminate this unfamiliar but radiantly beautiful world.

The Tale’s literary and cultural legacy has been enormous, with its influence in Japan often compared to that of Shakespeare on the English-speaking world. It has inspired everything from a genre of artworks (Genji-e) and noh theatre dramas (Genji nō) to contemporary manga, anime, films and plays and has had a profound influence on modern Japanese authors including Natsume Sōseki, Tanizaki Jun’ichiro, Enchi Fumiko, Mishima Yukio and Kawabata Yasunari.

Comprised of 54 chapters, the Tale is often divided into three parts, breaking at chapters 33 and 42. Chapters 1-33 tell of Genji’s exploits; 34-41 of his old age and death; and 42-54 the exploits of his grandson and supposed son. For this study we propose to read Chapters 1-33 in Part 1 and the remaining chapters in a Part 2 to be arranged later in 2027.

JOINING DETAILS:

The Tale of Genji: Part 1 – eleven-meeting study led by Lewis Ward and Alexis Cambanis

Tuesdays, 7.30-9.30 pm (UK time), 2 February – 9 March, no meeting on 16 March, 23 March – 20 April.

£495 for 22 hours of study time with two facilitators, to include background information and resources.

Required edition: The Tale of Genji, translated by Royall Tyler, Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780142437148.

Organizer

Lewis Ward & Alexis Cambanis

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2 February 2027 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm(GMT+00:00)

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9February 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm16February 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm23February 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm2March 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm9March 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm23March 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm30March 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm6April 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm13April 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm20April 20277:30 pm - 9:30 pm

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Gerard Manley Hopkins - Selected PoemsFOUR-MEETING STUDY LED BY SEAN FORESTER LIVE ON ZOOM, 4-25 FEBRUARY, 6.00-8.00 PM (UK TIME)2027thu04feb6:00 pm8:00 pm6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySean Forester

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Gerard Manley Hopkins is one of the most distinctive voices in English poetry. The alliteration, assonance and powerful rhythm in his poems are striking. Hopkins had a keen sense of beauty, a love of nature and a deep Christian faith, but he was also tortured by doubt and depression. His poems are tender and ecstatic; they are filled with wonder, with fear, with surprise, with despair and with hope.

Bridging Romanticism and Modernism, Hopkins is one of the most original poets of the 19th Century. He developed his own prosody called “sprung rhythm”, a form of accentual verse that he felt was closer to the rhythm of the way people actually speak. At the same time, he pushed the limits of language:

“I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy!”

from The Windhover

Please join us as we read and discuss together some of Hopkins’ most celebrated poems:

God’s Grandeur

Spring

Pied Beauty

Carrion Comfort

Hurrahing in Harvest

The Windhover

The Starlight Night

and two of his dark sonnets:

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

My own heart let me more have pity on

JOINING DETAILS:

Four-meeting study live on Zoom led by Sean Forester

Thursdays 4, 11, 18 & 25 February, 2027, 6.00-8.00 pm (UK time)

£160 for four two-hour meetings

The recommended edition of the poems is Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose, Selected with an Introduction and Notes by W.H. Gardner, Penguin Books,2008, ISBN-13: 978-0-140-42015-9. Sean will also send out links to the individual poems we will study.

Organizer

Sean Forester

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4 February 2027 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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The Nibelungenlied FIVE MEETING STUDY, LED BY SEAN FORESTER LIVE ON ZOOM, 7 FEBRUARY - 7 MARCH 2027, 5.45-7.45 PM (UK TIME)2027sun07feb5:45 pm7:45 am5:45 pm - 7:45 am(GMT+00:00) Type of studyPoetryLIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized BySean Forester

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*13th century image of Niebelungen warriors, via Wikimedia Commons*

If you have visited the current exhibition of The Bayeux Tapestry and been drawn to explore more of the world of battles and betrayals, you may want to consider joining this reading of a work of medieval literature believed to have been created some hundred years later.

The Nibelungenlied is a medieval epic poem of love, betrayal and revenge, and a major source text for Wagner’s Ring Cycle. Some have called The Nibelungenlied the German Iliad, because it explores honour and kinship along with the brutalities of war. As The Reader’s Companion to World Literature says, “the characters are boldly drawn, larger-than-life figures moved by the fundamental passions of love, hate, loyalty, power, and greed.” At the centre of the story is the hero Siegfried and his murder. This takes place in Part I, while Part II is devoted to Siegfried’s wife Kriemhild’s brutal revenge on her family.

First we will discuss The Nibelungenlied as a work of literature. Then we will consider how Wagner adapted it for his libretto for The Ring. This study is part of our 2027 Wagner series, but you can sign up to for The Nibelungenlied without attending the other Wagner offerings.

JOINING DETAILS:

Five-meeting study led by Sean Forester, live on Zoom

Sundays 7, 14, 21, 28 February & 7 March 2027, 5.45-7.45 pm (UK time)

£200 for five meetings

Relevant books: The Nibelungenlied translated by A.T. Hatto (Penguin Classics); The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner, translated by John Deathridge (Penguin Classics).

Organizer

Sean Forester

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Time

7 February 2027 5:45 pm - 7:45 am(GMT+00:00)

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March 2027

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor ColeridgeTWO-MEETING STUDY, LIVE ON ZOOM, 3 & 10 MARCH 2027, 5.00-7.00 PM (UK TIME)2027wed03mar5:00 pm7:00 pm5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00) LIVE ON ZOOM Event Organized ByJulie Sutherland

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*The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Gustave Doré, Wikimedia Commons*

Join us for a study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s atmospheric poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We’ll read the complete composition together, pausing between each of its seven parts to discuss the mariner’s journey and the world he inhabits.

We’ll explore how Coleridge builds suspense and mystery through vivid imagery, shifting rhythms, and encounters with the uncanny. Along the way, we’ll consider the poem’s questions about responsibility, suffering, isolation, and our relationship with the natural world.

JOINING DETAILS:

Two meeting study led by Julie Sutherland

Wednesdays, 3 & 10 March, 5.00-7.00 pm (UK time)

Recommended edition The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Astor Annotated Edition), edited by Haydn Wood, ISBN-13: ‎ 979-8190357332

Please note this edition draws on the authoritative 1834 text

£80 for two meeting study, to include notes and resources.

Organizer

Julie Sutherland

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Time

3 March 2027 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm(GMT+00:00)

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Location

LIVE ON ZOOM

Future Event Times in this Repeating Event Series

10March 20275:00 pm - 7:00 pm

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Enquire before you buy

April 2027

Virginia Woolf in Alfriston 2027 (Study 1) - To the Lighthouse, celebrating 100 years since publicationFOUR DAY TRAVEL STUDY, 8 -11 APRIL 20272027thu08apr(apr 8)4:00 pmsun11(apr 11)1:00 pm4:00 pm - 1:00 pm (11)(GMT+01:00) Type of studyLiterature, TravelWingrove House, High Street, Alfriston, East Sussex, BN26 5TD Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Karina Jakubowicz

Event Details

This will be our fifth year offering opportunities to read Virginia Woolf in East Sussex, a county which in many ways became the writer’s spiritual home. Basing ourselves in the village of Alfriston, we can consider her work surrounded by some of the countryside she loved best. In 2027 we will run two long weekend studies: the first (8-11 April) will focus on her 1927 masterpiece To the Lighthouse in its centenary year; while in the second (15-18 April) we will explore her 1928 novel Orlando.

As one of the key members of the celebrated Bloomsbury Group, Woolf is often seen as a London writer, but she and her husband Leonard had an abiding love for the South Downs. Together they purchased Monk’s House near Rodmell in 1919 and used it as their writers’ retreat. Virginia created some of her major works there and the Sussex landscape was integral to her writing as she tried to capture what she saw as its unsurpassable beauty.

Widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century, Virginia Woolf described To the Lighthouse as ‘an elegy’. She considered it ‘easily the best of my books’ and acknowledged strong autobiographical elements, including the characters of Mr and Mrs Ramsay who were modelled closely on her own parents.

*Portrait of Virginia Woolf by Roger Fry*, public domain

“This theme may be sentimental; father and mother and child in the garden; the death; the sail to the Lighthouse. I think, though, that when I begin it, I shall enrich it in all sorts of ways; thicken it; give it branches—roots which I do not perceive now.”

Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary, 14 May 1925

*Facsimile edition (Vintage) using Vanessa Bell’s original 1927 jacket design for The Hogarth Press*

First published on 5 May 1927, this extraordinary work rewards reading and re-reading. Every encounter reveals new facets of Woolf’s world. Toby Brothers, founder of the London Literary Salon and co-facilitator of the study, admits that even after more than twenty close readings she still learns from the book, always finding new resonances and greater understanding to share with study participants.

Feedback from recent travel studies reading Virginia Woolf:

” . . . a truly wonderful experience. And a huge thank you for all you do to make such events so extraordinary.”

“Travel Studies are worth going the distance for. Set against the backdrop of a place related to the book you are reading, a travel study makes the words come alive over time and feel shot through with new meaning.”

“I feel like the LitSalon is the book group I’ve always needed and I’m willing to travel all the way from California to be part of it (and you can quote me on that).”

Toby will co-facilitate this study with literary scholar Karina Jakubowicz, creator and presenter of The Virginia Woolf Podcast.

JOINING DETAILS:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘To the Lighthouse in Alfriston 2027’ as the subject line. To reserve a place please use the form below to pay an initial deposit of £50. Full payment will be payable using bank transfer by 31 January 2027.

Four-day in-person study facilitated by Toby Brothers and Karina Jakubowicz

Thursday 8 – Sunday 11 April 2027, Alfriston, East Sussex

This is an opportunity to enjoy the locale, including visiting Charleston House, Charleston in Lewes and Monk’s House, as well as joining with other readers in discussing Woolf’s achievement in To the Lighthouse and its relationship to Woolf’s other works. We will also research outings in the area based on exhibits that will be available at the time of our visit, opportunities will be added to the schedule as we confirm the best options.

As in previous years, we are in conversation with our fellow enthusiasts at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, who have created a great community that celebrates reading and the art of books in wonderful ways. Together we will offer an event celebrating Woolf and To the Lighthouse during our stay there.

£550 for twelve hours (or more) of study in six meetings spread over four days, plus accommodation costs which must be booked and paid for direct (please see details below).

Please note that participants are responsible for booking their own travel, accommodation and any insurance required (travel insurance is recommended if you are visiting the UK from overseas).

We will stay at Wingrove House, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel set in the beautiful and historic village of Alfriston, East Sussex in the South Downs National Park. We will be within easy reach of sites associated with Bloomsbury, making it the ideal choice for Woolf-related Salons. We expect the cost per night, including breakfast, to start at £192.00 per room, rising to a maximum of £262.50 (charges vary across a range of accommodation). These rates are discounted for London Literary Salon participants but the hotel is very popular and the accommodation is not reserved in advance, so please book your room as soon as possible after registering for the study and mention the London Literary Salon when booking.

Recommended edition: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, Penguin Classics ISBN: 9780241371954

Organizer

Toby Brothers & Karina Jakubowicz

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Time

8 April 2027 4:00 pm - 11 April 2027 1:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

...

Location

Wingrove House

High Street, Alfriston, East Sussex, BN26 5TD

Book this Salon

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE 2027 DEPOSIT (£500 balance payable by bank transfer by 31 January 2027))

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Virginia Woolf in Alfriston 2027 (Study 2) - OrlandoFOUR DAY TRAVEL STUDY, 15-18 APRIL 20272027thu15apr(apr 15)4:00 pmsun18(apr 18)12:00 pm4:00 pm - 12:00 pm (18)(GMT+01:00) Type of studyLiterature, TravelWingrove House, High Street, Alfriston, East Sussex, BN26 5TD Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Karina Jakubowicz

Event Details

There are a number of other Bloomsbury outposts in the area: in 1916 Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell, moved to Charleston Farmhouse with the painter Duncan Grant, while John Maynard Keynes and his wife Lydia Lopokova also settled locally. In the nearby Weald of Kent stands Sissinghurst Castle, which Vita Sackville-West bought with her husband Harold Nicolson before creating together what would become one of England’s best-loved gardens.

Inspired by Vita Sackville-West, her close friend and lover, Virginia Woolf’s mock-biography, Orlando, has been called ‘the longest love letter in the English language.’ The central character survives centuries and emulates Tiresias (the blind prophet of Thebes who was transformed into a woman for seven years and then back into a man). By changing genders, Orlando is given the unique ability to compare what it is to be male and what it is to be female.

You can view the trailer for Sally Potter’s extraordinary 1992 film of Orlando starring Tilda Swinton below.

“At any rate, it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck, that she realised with a start the penalties and privileges of her position.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

*Portrait of Vita Sackville-West by William Strang, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Critics disagree about how to categorise Orlando, is it an ironic biography or an imagined autobiography? The proposal of Virginia Woolf as a comic genius is not how we usually consider this writer of such nuance and profundity, whose work combines narrative beauty, unique aesthetic and remarkable understanding of the depths of the human mind. In this book she seeks to probe the limits of gender, writing long before gender was understood to be a social construct.

Woolf was, as always, ahead of her time.and, as always, reading the work and participating in the discussions it provokes – around gender, same-sex love, societal constraints, the search for joy across historical epochs and the genre of biography itself – will illuminate the chaotic world we live in, where gender continues to be problematised and re-considered.

“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind.”

Virginia Woolf, Orlando

JOINING DETAILS:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Orlando in Alfriston 2027’ as the subject line. To reserve a place please use the form below to pay an initial deposit of £50. Full payment will be due using bank transfer by 31 January 2027.

Four-day in-person study facilitated by Toby Brothers and Karina Jakubowicz

Thursday 15 – Sunday 18 April 2027, Alfriston, East Sussex

This is an opportunity to enjoy the locale, including visiting Charleston House, Charleston in Lewes and Monk’s House, as well as joining with other readers in discussing Woolf’s achievement in Orlando and its relationship to Woolf’s other works. We will also research outings in the area based on exhibits that will be available at the time of our visit, opportunities will be added to the schedule as we confirm the best options.

As in previous years, we are in conversation with our fellow enthusiasts at Much Ado Books in Alfriston, who have created a great community that celebrates reading and the art of books in wonderful ways. Together we will offer an event celebrating Woolf and Orlando during our stay there.

£550 for twelve hours (or more) of study in six meetings spread over four days, plus accommodation costs which must be booked and paid for direct (please see details below).

Please note that participants are responsible for booking their own travel, accommodation and any insurance required (travel insurance is recommended if you are visiting the UK from overseas, just in case).

We will stay at Wingrove House, a 19th century colonial-style country house hotel set in the beautiful and historic village of Alfriston, East Sussex in the South Downs National Park. We will be within easy reach of sites associated with Bloomsbury, making it the ideal choice for Woolf-related Salons. We expect the cost per night, including breakfast, to start at £192.00 per room, rising to a maximum of £262.50 (charges vary across a range of accommodation). These rates are discounted for London Literary Salon participants, but the hotel is very popular and the accommodation is not reserved in advance, so please book your room as soon as possible after registering for the study and mention the London Literary Salon when booking.

Recommended edition: Orlando by Virginia Woolf, Vintage Classics, ISBN: 9781784870850

Organizer

Toby Brothers & Karina Jakubowicz

Learn More

Time

15 April 2027 4:00 pm - 18 April 2027 12:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

...

Location

Wingrove House

High Street, Alfriston, East Sussex, BN26 5TD

Book this Salon

ORLANDO 2027 DEPOSIT (£500 balance payable by bank transfer by 31 January 2027)

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Medea in GreeceSEVEN-DAY STUDY ON THE ISLAND OF AGISTRI2027thu29apr(apr 29)5:00 pmthu06may(may 6)9:00 am(April 29) 5:00 pm - (May 6) 9:00 am(GMT+01:00) Type of studyClassical, Travel Event Organized ByToby Brothers, Jane Wymark & Keith Fosbrook

Event Details

We are now planning for 2027 and our sixth visit to the enchanting island of Agistri in the Saronic Gulf, where we read the classical literature of Ancient Greece. Over three week-long studies, we will study Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’ Medea, and The Bacchae by Euripides with Aristophanes’ The Birds. Reading these extraordinary and enduring works in the midst of this land and seascape can only deepen and enrich our experience of the texts. Do take a look at our ‘Gallery’ page and below to see photos from our previous studies on the island.

*Medea by Frederick Sandys, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

First performed in 431BCE, as the third – and only surviving – part of a trilogy, Medea remains one of the most-produced Greek tragedies. It is an exploration of the roles of men and women, both actual and ideal, but is it also an argument for sexual equality?

In a monologue addressed to the Chorus – our moral conscience – Medea produces a memorable assertion about a gap in understanding between men and women. She tells us that men

“. . . say that we live a life free from danger at home, while they fight with the spear. They are so wrong! For I would rather take my stand three times with a shield in battle than once give birth to a child.“

We know that in Athens, women were not permitted to exercise legal, economic or social autonomy. How can we therefore explain the fact that the tragic plays that survive often portray them as having influential social and moral force? Can we think of Euripides in particular as a kind of proto-feminist? There are many occasions in Medea and other of his plays when his characters express damning general criticisms of women. Could a ‘proto-feminist’ be also a misogynist?

Medea has already committed two murders, both of them in service of Jason – who subsequently abandons her in favour of a younger and richer woman. The precise details of her plotting of revenge on him are so gruesome that we may struggle to feel sympathy for her. If one wanted to write a play about ‘proto-feminism’, would one not try to make the central character more engaging?

But Euripides is not trying to create a sympathetic character to whom we can relate in an easy, comfortable way. His aim is to confront us with something truly shocking and to explore issues which we might choose to avoid. It is possible to compare Medea with Oedipus, even though the contrasts are obvious: one acts from good intentions and has no idea of the terrible deeds he has done, whereas the other acts from malign intent and knows exactly what terrible things she has done and intends to do. The similarities lie in the way they both dominate their plays, being hardly ever off stage, and act as chief protagonists who determine the course of events, by their bold actions confronting things we might prefer to turn away from. And perhaps this is why Euripides can appear so modern to us. Terrible things breed in broken hearts.

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-day study of Euripides’ Medea on the island of Agistri: Thursday 29 April-Thursday 6 May 2027

Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Jane Wymark and Keith Fosbrook

Cost: £950 for the Salon study, to include a preparatory meeting in April (on Zoom, date to be confirmed), background materials and opening notes. Opening notes will be sent after registration.

The study programme will run for four to five hours per day for five days, with one day left open and travel days at each end (arriving by 17.00 local time on Day 1 and leaving by 09.00 on Day 8). There will be opportunities for other optional activities including kayaking adventures, trips to local sights, or pure relaxation.

Before you arrive on Agistri we will ask you to read Medea, we recommend the Norton Critical Edition, translated and edited by Sheila Murnaghan, ISBN13: 9780393265453.

Payment: we ask for an initial (non-returnable) deposit of £100 on registration to secure your place using the booking form below. The balance of £850 will be payable by bank transfer (we will supply bank details), due by 31 January 2027.

Refunds: please note that any refunds will be entirely at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to a charge to cover our administration costs.

Waiting list: if the study sells out early we will maintain a waiting list as we sometimes find that people have to withdraw for reasons beyond their control.

BOOKING & ENQUIRIES:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Agistri 2027 – Medea’ as the subject line.

ACCOMMODATION COSTS:

Room and half board (breakfast and dinner each day) will be arranged with the hotel by the individual participant and paid for directly to them. A deposit to cover accommodation for two nights will be required by the hotel on booking. We will send you full contact details for payment on registration. We have set out the anticipated charges below, but these may be subject to change at the time of booking at the discretion of the hotel.

Accommodation prices per night at the hotel – Rosy’s Little Village – are estimated below on the basis of figures available in July 2026 but may be subject to small changes:

Single – €80 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per day

Double – €90 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for two people – €100 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for three people – €110 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Please consider sharing accommodation with another participant as this helps us to ensure that everyone can stay on site; double and triple rooms offer split levels and so allow sharers a significant degree of personal privacy.

OTHER ADDITIONAL COSTS TO BUDGET FOR:

Flights to Athens: when booking please make sure you can arrive at the port of Piraeus by 15.00 local time on the first day of your study to catch the ferry. We will not be meeting formally on the final day of the study, so you have choices about your return (ferries are frequent and the travel time to Piraeus is one hour) but participants normally leave Agistri at around 09.00.

Ferry to Agistri: normally around €14 each way.

Incidental expenses: drinks, lunches, extra trips etc.

Insurance: we hope this will be entirely redundant, but we ask you to arrange your own travel and health insurance to protect you in case of anything untoward happening. We will ask you for details of the insurance provider and reference number, as well as your mobile phone number and details of next of kin to add to our (confidential) records for use during the study.

Organizer

Toby Brothers, Jane Wymark & Keith Fosbrook

Learn More

Time

29 April 2027 5:00 pm - 6 May 2027 9:00 am(GMT+01:00)

...

Book this Salon

PAYMENT OF REGISTRATION FEE

The payment of £100 reserves your place on Medea on Agistri. The balance of £850 will be due for payment by bank transfer (we will supply details of the destination account) by 31 January 2027.

All places are booked

May 2027

The Odyssey in GreeceSEVEN-DAY TRAVEL STUDY ON THE GREEK ISLAND OF AGISTRI2027sat08may(may 8)5:00 pmsat15(may 15)9:00 am5:00 pm - 9:00 am (15)(GMT+01:00) Type of studyClassical, TravelAgistri, Greece Event Organized ByToby Brothers, Alison Cable & Susanna Taggart

Event Details

We are now planning for 2027 and our sixth visit to the enchanting island of Agistri in the Saronic Gulf to read the classical literature of Ancient Greece. Over three week-long studies, we will study Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’ Medea, and The Bacchae by Euripides with Aristophanes’ The Birds. Reading these extraordinary and enduring works in the midst of this land and seascape can only deepen and enrich our experience of the texts. Do take a look at our ‘Gallery’ page to see photos from our previous studies on the island.

*Odysseus and Calypso, Max Beckmann, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
the hallowed heights of Troy.
Many cities of men he saw and learned their minds,
many pains he suffered, heartsick on the open sea,
fighting to save his life and bring his comrades home.
But he could not save them from disaster, hard as he strove —
the recklessness of their own ways destroyed them all,
the blind fools, they devoured the cattle of the Sun
and the Sungod wiped from sight the day of their return.
Launch out on his story, Muse, daughter of Zeus,
start from where you will —sing for our time too.”

The opening lines of Robert Fagles’ translation of Homer’s Odyssey

In May 2027, for the sixth year running, we’ll be returning to Agistri – our Greek home-from-home – to study Homer’s Odyssey for one week. The Odyssey is a meditation on identity, homecoming, and finding one’s place in the world. Full of complex relationships and characters – including a wealth of compelling female figures – the poem explores hospitality, exile, and what it means to encounter and understand difference. It is also a collection of thrilling adventures, featuring our ‘hero’ pitted against fantastical monsters, seductive sorceresses, and the forces of nature.

The Odyssey continues to inspire artists more than two and a half millennia after it was composed. Christopher Nolan’s extraordinary film adaptation is now introducing the epic to a new generation, offering not a literal translation but a cinematic reimagining that uses the language of film – scale, imagery and narrative – to capture something of the poem’s richness and emotional power. The film is a reminder that Homer’s works are not simply monuments of the ancient world but living stories that continue to invite fresh interpretations.

Homer’s works form the foundation of Western civilisation, and their influence remains very much alive in the modern world; even on a first reading, the characters, themes and events can feel strikingly familiar. Those who have read The Iliad will recognise echoes of its world and witness the continuing stories of many of its central figures, but no prior knowledge is needed. On the island, we’ll be reading Homer in the land where it was composed and performed, where the landscape itself seems to reflect and illuminate the beauty of the language and themes. Each year we find that studying as a residential group creates fresh, rich understandings and new connections with both the work and one another.

This will be the fourth time we embark on reading the vivid and gripping Odyssey on Agistri. Our study will use Homer’s epic poem to explore closely the guest-host relationship, the defining struggle of humans against overwhelming nature, the experience of selfhood in foreign spaces, our understanding of the heroic, and the role of myth and epic in lived experience. Facilitators for the study are Salon Director Toby Brothers, together with Alison Cable and Susanna Taggart. Susanna, who combines her love of Ancient Greek literature with her professional life as a clinical psychologist, will bring to the discussion insights into the psychological challenges of post-combat living for returning soldiers, their loved ones, and communities.

As a complement to the textual study, writer and facilitator Alison Cable will lead a creative workshop inspired by Penelope, who weaves as an act of both duty and quiet resistance. Through a gentle introduction to off-loom weaving, participants will experience the rhythm of warp and weft as a way of thinking about pattern, connection and making. Alongside this hands-on exploration, through creative writing we will invite participants to weave words together in response to The Odyssey and its enduring themes. The landscape, visual art, poetry, and conversations throughout the week may also offer further inspiration for creative reflection.

The venue we have chosen for our stay on the beautiful and quiet island of Agistri is a small family-run hotel, easily accessible (just one hour by ferry from Athens). It provides the perfect setting for our study, offering a relaxing atmosphere, excellent food and opportunities for additional cultural and recreational activities. As one former participant commented: “The beauty and pleasure of the surroundings soothed my soul, leaving me feeling refreshed and connected to the literature and the group in ways I couldn’t have experienced at home.” Do come and join us!

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-day study of Homer’s Odyssey on the island of Agistri: Saturday 8-Saturday 15 May 2027

Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Alison Cable and Susanna Taggart

Cost: £950 for the Salon study, to include a preparatory meeting in April (on Zoom, date to be confirmed), background materials and opening notes. Opening notes will be sent after registration.

The study programme will run for four to five hours per day for five days, with one day left open and travel days at each end (arriving by 17.00 local time on Day 1 and leaving by 09.00 on Day 8). There will be opportunities for other optional activities including kayaking adventures, trips to local sights, or pure relaxation.

Before you arrive on Agistri we will ask you to read Robert Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey (Penguin Classics, ISBN: 9780140268867). We also recommend listening to Ian McKellen’s audio reading of Robert Fagles’ translation as a great way to experience The Odyssey in preparation for the study.

Payment: we ask for an initial (non-returnable) deposit of £100 on registration to secure your place using the booking form below. The balance of £850 will be payable by bank transfer (we will supply bank details), due by 31 January 2027.

Refunds: please note that any refunds will be entirely at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to a charge to cover our administration costs.

Waiting list: if the study sells out early we will maintain a waiting list as we sometimes find that people have to withdraw for reasons beyond their control.

BOOKING & ENQUIRIES:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Agistri 2027 – Odyssey’ as the subject line.

ACCOMMODATION COSTS:

Accommodation prices per night at the hotel – Rosy’s Little Village – are estimated below on the basis of figures available in July 2026 but may be subject to small changes:

Single – €80 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per day

Double – €90 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for two people – €100 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for three people – €110 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

OTHER ADDITIONAL COSTS TO BUDGET FOR:

Ferry to Agistri: normally around €14 each way.

Incidental expenses: drinks, lunches, extra trips etc.

Organizer

Toby Brothers, Alison Cable & Susanna Taggart

Learn More

Time

8 May 2027 5:00 pm - 15 May 2027 9:00 am(GMT+01:00)

...

Location

Agistri, Greece

Book this Salon

PAYMENT OF REGISTRATION FEE

The payment of £100 reserves your place on The Odyssey on Agistri. The balance of £850 will be due for payment by bank transfer (we will supply details of the destination account) by 31 January 2027.

Enquire before you buy

The Bacchae & The Birds in GreeceSEVEN-DAY TRAVEL STUDY ON THE ISLAND OF AGISTRI2027mon17may(may 17)5:00 pmmon24(may 24)9:00 pm5:00 pm - 9:00 pm (24)(GMT+01:00) Type of studyClassical, Travel Event Organized ByToby Brothers, Caroline Hammond & Susanna Taggart

Event Details

We are now preparing for 2027 and our sixth visit to the enchanting island of Agistri in the Saronic Gulf to read the classical literature of Ancient Greece. Over three week-long studies, we will study Homer’s Odyssey, Euripides’ Medea, and The Bacchae by Euripides with Aristophanes’ The Birds. Reading these extraordinary and enduring works in the midst of this land and seascape can only deepen and enrich our experience of the texts. Do take a look at our ‘Gallery’ page and below to see photos from our previous studies on the island.

*Photograph of Roman fresco from Pompeii, Wolfgang Rieger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons*

Join us on Agistri to study a wonderful double bill of tragedy and comedy – The Bacchae by Euripides and The Birds by Aristophanes.

“Light the fiery torch of lightning!
Burn it all, burn it down, burn the whole house of Pentheus!”

Euripides, The Bacchae

The Bacchae tells the story of how Dionysus – god of wine, festivity and frenzy – takes revenge on King Pentheus of Thebes for rejecting his power. Dionysus first drives Pentheus insane then lures him to the mountains surrounding Thebes. There Pentheus’ mother and a band of Dionysus’ frenzied female followers take their bloody revenge.

First performed in 406 BCE, The Bacchae is Euripides’ final play and was awarded first prize at the Dionysia festival posthumously. Considered by many to be his finest work, it is revered for the beauty of its language and the complexity with which Euripides addresses the issues of faith and society. There are themes too of a struggle between ‘civilisation’ and primal instincts, as well as suppressed emotions causing a threat to society.

Thomas Macaulay wrote: “The Bacchae is a glorious play. It is often very obscure; and I am not sure that I understand its general scope. But, as a piece of language, it is hardly equalled in the world. And, whether it was intended to encourage or to discourage fanaticism, the picture of fanatical excitement which it exhibits has never been rivalled.”

In Ancient Greece, theatre performances moved from tragedy to comedy, shifting audiences from horror and despair to lightness and joy. Similarly, we’ll move from the high drama of The Bacchae to the satire and wit of The Birds.

In The Birds, Aristophanes tells the story of how two Athenians, Pisthetaerus and Euelpides, leave the world of men in search of a city without pettiness and corruption to live in peace and justice. They search for Tereus, a king who has managed to change himself into a hoopoe, or so he says, and married a nightingale. Together with the birds, they establish a state in the ether and build a wall between men and the gods. The work of building their prototype community is interrupted by various Athenians keen to interfere, including a poet, a seer and a town planner. Finally, a delegation from the gods, outraged by the loss of access to their human supplicants, arrives for a final showdown.

First performed in 414 BCE, The Birds is acclaimed for the completeness of the fantasy world created and the lyrical beauty of its depiction of the world of birds. The social satire seems as relevant to modern times as when it was written. And there are some good jokes!

Combining a tragic and a comic play in one study allows us a fresh perspective on the elements of Ancient Greek theatre and insights into how dramatists connected with their audiences and reflected their world back to them.

We’ll be reading The Baachae from The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library Classics, ISBN-10: ‎0812993004, ISBN-13: 978-0812993004) but all translations are welcome.

We’ll be reading The Birds by Aristophanes from The Birds and Other Plays: The Knights/Peace/Wealth/The Assembly Women (Penguin Classics, ISBN-13 ‏: ‎978-0141913223) but all translations are welcome.

JOINING DETAILS:

Seven-day study of Euripides’ The Bacchae and Aristophanes’ The Birds on the island of Agistri: Monday 17-Monday 24 May 2027

Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Caroline Hammond and Susanna Taggart

Cost: £950 for the Salon study, to include a preparatory meeting in April (on Zoom, date to be confirmed), background materials and opening notes. Opening notes will be sent after registration.

The study programme will run for four to five hours per day for five days, with one day left open and travel days at each end (arriving by 17.00 local time on Day 1 and leaving by 09.00 on Day 8). There will be opportunities for other optional activities including kayaking adventures, trips to local sites, or pure relaxation.

Before you arrive on Agistri we will ask you to read both The Bacchae and The Birds (recommended editions are given above).

Payment: we ask for an initial (non-returnable) deposit of £100 on registration to secure your place using the booking form below. The balance of £850 will be payable by bank transfer (we will supply bank details), due by 31 January 2027.

Refunds: please note that any refunds will be entirely at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to a charge to cover our administration costs.

Waiting list: if the study sells out early we will maintain a waiting list as we sometimes find that people have to withdraw for reasons beyond their control.

BOOKING & ENQUIRIES:

To ask questions please email us at litsalon@gmail.com using ‘Agistri 2027 – The Bacchae & Birds’ as the subject line.

ACCOMMODATION COSTS:

Accommodation prices per night at the hotel – Rosy’s Little Village – are estimated below on the basis of figures available in July 2026 but may be subject to small changes:

Single – €80 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per day

Double – €90 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for two people – €100 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

Family room for three people – €110 per night plus half board (breakfast and dinner) estimated at €55 per person per day

OTHER ADDITIONAL COSTS TO BUDGET FOR:

Ferry to Agistri: normally around €14 each way.

Incidental expenses: drinks, lunches, extra trips etc.

Organizer

Toby Brothers, Caroline Hammond & Susanna Taggart

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Time

17 May 2027 5:00 pm - 24 May 2027 9:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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The payment of £100 reserves your place on The Bacchae and The Birds on Agistri. The balance of £850 will be due for payment by bank transfer (we will supply details of the destination account) by 31 January 2027.

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July 2027

Jane Eyre on the moors: reading & walking in the Peak District 2027FIVE DAY TRAVEL STUDY IN EDALE, DERBYSHIRE LED BY TOBY BROTHERS & ALISON CABLE2027thu29jul(jul 29)1:00 pmmon02aug(aug 2)12:00 pm(July 29) 1:00 pm - (August 2) 12:00 pm(GMT+01:00) Type of studyCreative Writing, Literature, TravelEdale, Derbyshire Event Organized ByToby Brothers & Alison Cable

Event Details

*Photographs of our visit to Edale in June 2026*

The London Literary Salon offers you the opportunity to join a five-day study based in Edale, in the Peak District National Park in July 2027, where we will explore Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre — an invitation to read, walk and reflect in immersive engagement with Brontë’s novel and the landscape that inspired it.

How might we read Jane Eyre today — as a story of selfhood and rebellion, but also as a text shaped by gender, empire, class and desire? This immersive study combines literary discussion and walking on the moorland paths that inspired Brontë’s novel, with opportunities for morning stretches and reflective writing. A short train trip to Hathersage, the village closely linked to the novel, will offer further insight into the places that inspired Brontë’s writing. Participants may choose to walk the circular 8 km Jane Eyre Hathersage Trail, tracing the village, architecture and landscape that shaped Brontë’s imagination.

Toby Brothers will lead the literary discussions, guiding the group through the rich text with reflections that include psychological, feminist, postcolonial and queer readings of Jane Eyre. Alison Cable will co-facilitate and offer walking and creative writing space, encouraging reflection, response and imaginative engagement with both text and landscape. Together, we will explore the familiar and the overlooked: Jane’s struggles for autonomy, the silences within the text, and the ways literature continues to resonate with questions of freedom, identity and justice in our own lives, here and now.

According to the poet, essayist and feminist Adrienne Rich:

‘The concern of the tale is not with social mores, the social mores may occur among the risks and challenges encountered by the protagonist. Neither is it an anatomy of the psyche, the faded chemistry of cosmic forces. It takes its place between the two: between the realm of the given, that which is changeable by human activity, and the realm of the fated, that which lies outside human control: between realism and poetry.

‘The world of the tale is above all a “vale of soul making”, and when a novelist finds herself writing a tale it is likely to be because she is moved by that vibration of experience which underlies the social and political, though it constantly feeds into both of these. In her essay on Jane Eyre, critic Q.D. Leavis perceives the novel’s theme as “. . . an exploration of how a woman comes to maturity in the world of the writer’s youth”. I would suggest that a novel about how a man “comes to maturity in the world of the writers youth” would not be dismissed as lacking in range or in Woolf’s words, “a sense of human problems”. I would suggest further that Charlotte Bronte is writing not a bildungsroman but the life story of a woman who is incapable of saying “I am Heathcliff” because she feels so unalterably herself. Jane Eyre, motherless and economically powerless, undergoes certain traditional female temptations, and finds that each temptation presents itself along with an alternative –the image of a nurturing or principled or spirited woman on whom she can model herself, or to whom she can look for support.‘

Adrienne Rich, Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman (published in the Norton Critical Edition of Jane Eyre)

While Virginia Woolf wrote that the Brontës:

‘. . . seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters, and so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer’s powers of observation – they carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book.’

Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (1916)

We will be based in Edale, with accommodation confirmed at The Gathering, a combination of glamping ‘lodges’ and barns, with options for shared or single rooms. Walking across the hills and moors will offer space for thought and inspiration, but all activities are optional: indoors, we will read, write and talk together, fostering immersive engagement with text and the landscape. To round out the evenings, participants may choose to join the local pub quiz, or just take in the lively sense of the village community and place.

SAMPLE SESSIONS INCLUDE:

Morning and afternoon literary discussions with Toby Brothers and Alison Cable: close reading of key passages, exploring Jane’s journey, moral choices and the novel’s social and political contexts. Short walks with Alison Cable: gentle, reflective walking, with opportunities to use the landscape as inspiration for written response.

Jane Eyre Hathersage Walk: short train trip to Hathersage, to visit the village that inspired Brontë, with an optional walk to Stanage Edge, passing ‘Vale Hall,’ ‘Thornfield’ and ‘Moor House’, and the added bonus of Robin Hood’s cave and the gravesite of Little John. PLEASE NOTE: The trail is rated ‘moderate’, with one steep climb and descent; there is a shorter option to walk to North Leas Hall (the inspiration for Thornfield) and back.

Evening reflection sessions: sharing insights, discussing emergent themes, and optional participation in pub quiz (Friday).

JOINING DETAILS:

Five-day study in Edale, Derbyshire led by Toby Brothers and Alison Cable

29 July – 2 August 2027

£600 for the study and background notes, plus £175 for three days half board (breakfast and lunch on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, breakfast on Monday) plus £100 initial deposit on accommodation at The Gathering, total cost £875.

Additional costs: participants are responsible for arranging and paying for their own travel, accommodation and additional meals and insurance. We have reserved a variety of rooms at The Gathering (an initial £100 deposit is included in the registration fee) and will liaise with the venue – participants are asked to advise us of their preferences on booking the study. Although we will endeavour to meet your requirements, we will allocate the reserved accommodation on a first-come-first-served basis, please consider sharing accommodation with another participant as this helps us to ensure everyone can stay on site .

We strongly recommend reading or re-reading Jane Eyre in preparation for the weekend so the language, ideas and vision of the text are fresh.

Recommended edition: Norton Critical Fourth Edition (published in 2016, this is preferable to the third edition) ISBN: 978-0-393-64050-2.

An initial non-refundable deposit of £150 secures your place on the study and a reservation on accommodation at The Gathering. The balance of £725 (which will cover the cost of the study, breakfasts and lunches) will be payable by 1 May 2027.

Any refunds will be at the discretion of the London Literary Salon, dependent on our ability to fill the place, and will be subject to an administration charge.

Organizer

Toby Brothers & Alison Cable

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Time

29 July 2027 1:00 pm - 2 August 2027 12:00 pm(GMT+01:00)

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Location

Edale, Derbyshire

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BOOKING DEPOSIT OF £150 TO BE PAID ON REGISTRATION. THE BALANCE OF £725 WILL BE PAYABLE BY BANK TRANSFER BY 1 MAY 2027.

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September 2027

Herman Melville's Moby Dick afloat! 2027SIX-DAY STUDY OF HERMAN MELVILLE'S MOBY DICK ON BOARD THE EDA FRANDSEN2027mon13sep(sep 13)3:00 pmsun19(sep 19)9:00 am3:00 pm - 9:00 am (19)(GMT+01:00) Type of studyLiterature, TravelOban Event Organized ByToby Brothers

Event Details

“. . . learning seamanship illuminates the book brilliantly. Toby is inspiring, we never feel unconfident and we feel safe to think aloud. As a field trip, this is genius.”

Horatio Clare, Financial Times (writing about the 2025 Moby Dick Afloat!)

A not-to-be-missed opportunity to complete reading one of the greatest books ever written in English – an extraordinary story of obsession and maritime adventure – over the course of a six-day voyage aboard a traditional sailing ship. Four online meetings will introduce Moby Dick, followed by six study sessions at sea on the Eda Frandsen, a lovingly restored and maintained gaff cutter, originally built in Denmark in 1938. This unique study will allow readers to complement their appreciation of Herman Melville’s text with a practical understanding and experience of the reality of seafaring life under sail.

“I am half way in the work . . . It will be a strange sort of book, tho’, I fear; blubber is blubber you know; tho’ you might get oil out of it, the poetry runs as hard as sap from a frozen maple tree;—and to cool the thing up, one must needs throw in a little fancy, which from the nature of the thing, must be ungainly as the gambols of the whales themselves. Yet I mean to give the truth of the thing, spite of this.”

Herman Melville

First published in 1851, Moby Dick ranks on almost any list as one of the greatest works in the English language. Its three famous opening words ‘Call me Ishmael . . .’ together with the image of the one-legged Captain Ahab in mad pursuit of the great white whale, have become cultural icons. This grand—and occasionally grandiose—adventure tale unites the many voices of Herman Melville in a mongrel mix of epic poetry, Shakespearean tragedy, encyclopaedic cataloguing, biblical oratory, and not a small dose of comedy. Melville presents an insightful study of obsession, madness and charismatic leadership that anticipates many of our contemporary conversations about democracy, cosmopolitanism, capitalism and environmentalism.

In 2019, commemoration of the 200th year since Herman Melville’s birth generated rich responses and reconsiderations of this truly amazing book. Philip Hoare (mentioned below as one of the curators of the Moby Dick Big Read project) writes on its contemporary resonance in his article Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: Six reasons why Moby Dick is the novel for our times.

“The book features gay marriage, hits out at slavery and imperialism and predicts the climate crisis – 200 years after the birth of its author, Herman Melville, it has never been more important.”

Philip Hoare

Together, artist Angela Cockayne and writer Philip Hoare convened and curated a unique whale symposium and exhibition at Peninsula Arts, the dedicated contemporary art space at Plymouth University. This grew into an extraordinary compilation of art and voices (Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and more) – the Moby Dick Big Read – inspiring and inspired by this vast book.

Read Toby’s blog post about Moby Dick Afloat! in 2026.

SALON DETAILS:

Five two-hour meetings online, followed by six-day study with six nights on board the Eda Frandsen from 3.00pm on Monday 13 September 2026 to 9.00am on Sunday 19 September 2027.

Five online meetings (on Zoom) Wednesdays 5.30-7.30 pm (UK) in advance of departure, dates to be confirmed.

Facilitated by Toby Brothers, Salon Director

Recommended edition: Moby Dick (Norton Critical Edition, Third Edition 2018), by Herman Melville, edited by Herschel Parker; W.W. Norton & Co. ISBN-13: 978-0393285000

Cost for four online meetings and six-night voyage with study sessions, including opening notes will be £2,180.00 per person (£1,680 to cover the cost of sailing on the Eda Frandsen + £500 for the literary study).

Participants will be responsible for arranging their own travel to and from our departure and end point, the port of Oban on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands, as well as insurance to cover their trip.

We have just seven places available. If you are interested in joining, please email us using the subject line Moby Dick 2027 giving your name and a phone number on which we may contact you.

Please note that the voyage will involve sharing confined living and sleeping space while onboard. We do not require you to have nautical skills, but some time spent on sailing boats or camping would be useful so you know what to expect. We ask you to let us know in your email whether you have such experience and to confirm that you are in good physical health.

It is always possible that there may be rough seas and weather, so please consider carefully whether you are likely to be adversely affected by these conditions.

If we are able to offer you a place we will ask for an initial deposit of £100 per person, with the balance due by 31 December 2026.

Organizer

Toby Brothers

Salon Director...

Salon Director

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Time

13 September 2027 3:00 pm - 19 September 2027 9:00 am(GMT+01:00)

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Location

Oban

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£100 REGISTRATION FEE, THE BALANCE OF £2,080.00 WILL BE PAYABLE BY BANK TRANSFER NO LATER THAN 31 DECEMBER 2026

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Susanna Taggart & Caroline Hammond Events Upcoming Past

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Block 1: January – March 2026

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