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| M.G. Sanchez, Kristian Shaw & Your Correspondent |
Always a pleasure to be in Newcastle, especially so for me a
couple of weeks ago when I attended the Northumbria University conference 'Writers
and Intellectuals on Britain and Europe, 1918-2018,' convened by Dr Ann-Marie
Einhaus.
I had a couple of speaking functions to perform: first on a panel
called ‘Writers on Britain and Europe now,’ chaired by Bob Eaglestone from Royal
Holloway University, where I exchanged views with Fiona Shaw, Mark (‘M.G.’)
Sanchez and Kristian Shaw; and then in a
session entitled ‘Novelists on Brexit’ (chaired by Barbara Korte of Albert-Ludwigs-University
Freiburg, alongside Mark once more, plus Ina Habermann of the University of
Basel, and this time I delivered my paper: ‘“We must suffer them all again”:
Political fictions and their debt to “past experiments”’; I took my texts from
Auden, Brecht and Anthony Wedgwood-Benn.
A fascinating day in all; I met some terrifically smart people; I hope to publish my paper in due course; and
some of my contributions to the first panel session were captured pretty
faithfully on Twitter as below.
