What’s on?
Salon calendar & booking

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

“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.

“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)

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.

“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

“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.

‘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)

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

“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.

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

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.

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.