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THE ANSWERS

NEMO’S WELCOME

1.   Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Ch. 1

2.   John Donne, ‘Aire & Angells’

3.   T. S. Eliot, ‘Gus, the Theatre Cat’, from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats

4.   William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, ii

5.   Philip Larkin, ‘The Old Fools’

6.   Thomas De Quincey, ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’

7.   Alexander Pope, ‘Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady’

8.   Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders, opening sentence

9.   William Blake, ‘Infant Joy’

10. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, Ch. 2

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THE ALMANAC

*The seventh answer in each of the following 60 themed sections has been intentionally omitted to create a separate challenge: see ‘How to use this book’ on page xviii for more details.

JANUARY

A : WINTER

1.   William Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost, Act V, ii

2.   Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Ash-boughs’

3.   John Donne, ‘Twicknam Garden’

4.   James Joyce, ‘The Dead’, Dubliners

5.   Byron, Don Juan, Canto V, 58

6.   Ann Taylor, ‘Snow’

7.   *

B : BREAKFAST

1.   F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘May Day’

2.   Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle, Ch. 2

3.   Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Ch. 8

4.   Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat, Ch. 11

5.   Anthony Trollope, The Warden, Ch. VIII

6.   W. S. Gilbert, Trial By Jury (Defendant)

7.   *

C : SNOW

1.   Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Ch. 3, ‘The Wild Wood’

2.   Robert Bridges, ‘London Snow’

3.   Wallace Stevens, ‘The Snow Man’

4.   Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’

5.   Christina Rossetti, ‘A Christmas Carol’

6.   Jane Austen, letter to her sister, March 7, 1814

7.   *

D : SKATING

1.   William Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book I

2.   Philippa Pearce, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Ch. XXIII

3.   Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Ch. 1

4.   James Thomson, The Seasons (Winter)

5.   John Evelyn, Diary, December 1, 1662

6.   Marina Warner, The Skating Party, Ch. 1

7.   *

E : CHOCOLATE

1.   Hilaire Belloc, ‘Jim, who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion’

2.   Edward Lear, ‘By Way of Preface’

3.   Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, Ch. 2

4.   Andrew Marvell, ‘Clarendon’s Housewarming’

5.   Richmal Crompton, Just William, ‘William’s New Year’s Day’

6.   Samuel Pepys, Diary, April 24, 1661

7.   *

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FEBRUARY

A: TRANSPORT AND TRAVEL

1.   William Brighty Rands, ‘The Pedlar’s Caravan’

2.   Anne Enright, The Gathering, Ch. 39

3.   T. S. Eliot, ‘Skimbleshanks: the Railway Cat’

4.   Paul Bowles, The Spider’s House, last page

5.   John Davidson, ‘Thirty Bob a Week’

6.   G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Rolling English Road’

7.   *

B: FOG

1.   George Gissing, New Grub Street, Ch. 8

2.   Charles Dickens, Bleak House, Ch. 1

3.   William Makepeace Thackeray, Pendennis, Ch. XXIX

4.   Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Ch. 4

5.   Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke, Ch. 1

6.   Jean Rhys, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Part II, Ch. 1

7.   *

C: ALDOUS HUXLEY BOOK TITLES

1.   William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act III, i

2.   Christopher Marlowe, Edward II, Act I, i

3.   John Milton, Samson Agonistes

4.   Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’

5.   William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, i

6.   William Wordsworth, ‘The tables turned. An evening scene on the same subject’

7.   *

D: VALENTINES

1.   Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ‘Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve’ (‘Chaucer’s Retraction’)

2.   Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, VI, vii

3.   John Clare, ‘A Valentine’, last stanza

4.   Robert Herrick, ‘To His Valentine, upon S. Valentine’s Day’

5.   William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act IV, v

6.   Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, Ch. XIX

7.   *

E: SWANS

1.   Orlando Gibbons, ‘The Silver Swan’

2.   W. B. Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’

3.   Laurie Lee, ‘Last Days’, Cider with Rosie

4.   Edmund Spenser, ‘Prothalamion’

5.   John Keats, ‘Sonnet to Byron’

6.   Aldous Huxley, ‘Leda’

7.   *

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MARCH

A : GHOSTS

1.   Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

2.   Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 1

3.   Charles Churchill, The Ghost, ll. 500–506

4.   M. R. James, ‘Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad’

5.   Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Ch. 3

6.   Toni Morrison, Beloved, final pages

7.   *

B: SNAILS

1.   William Shakespeare, ‘Venus and Adonis’

2.   John Clare, ‘Summer Images’

3.   Henry James, The Golden Bowl, Book II, Ch. 2

4.   John Gay, Fable XXIV, ‘The Butterfly and the Snail’

5.   Lewis Carroll, ‘The Lobster Quadrille’, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Ch. X

6.   Virginia Woolf, ‘The Mark on the Wall’

7.   *

C: DRUGS AND MEDICINES

1.   Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker, Vol. 1, letter to Dr. Lewis

2.   W. E. Henley, ‘Before’

3.   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, letter to John Morgan, May 14, 1814

4.   William Burroughs, The Naked Lunch, first section

5.   William Shakespeare, Othello, Act III, iii

6.   Thomas De Quincey, ‘The Pleasures of Opium’, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

7.   *

D: WIND

1.   Ernest Dowson, ‘Non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae’

2.   William Cowper, The Task, Book I, ‘The Sofa’

3.   Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Ode to the West Wind’

4.   Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., XV

5.   Angela Carter, Wise Children, Ch. 1

6.   D. H. Lawrence, ‘Song of a Man who has Come Through’

7.   *

E: SHIPS AND BOATS

1.   Robert Louis Stevenson, The Wrecker, Ch. 12

2.   Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Break, Break, Break’

3.   Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows, Ch. 1

4.   George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, Book 7, Ch. V

5.   Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, Ch. 1

6.   Derek Walcott, ‘A Sea-Chantey’

7.   *

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APRIL

A: APRIL

1.   T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

2.   W. H. Davies, ‘April’s Charms’

3.   Ben Jonson, ‘An Elegy on the Lady Jane Paulet’

4.   Robert Browning, ‘Home Thoughts from Abroad’

5.   Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales

6.   John Dowland, ‘Cleare or cloudie’

7.   *

B : HATS AND WIGS

1.   Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Vol. III, Ch. VII

2.   Edward Lear, ‘The Quangle-Wangle’s Hat’

3.   Oliver Sacks, ‘The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’

4.   Zadie Smith, White Teeth, Ch. 15

5.   Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Canto 1

6.   Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones, Ch. 1

7.   *

C: RAIN

1.   Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone, Ch. XIX

2.   Henry Thoreau, Walden, ‘Where I Lived and What I Lived For’

3.   Oliver Goldsmith, The Rising Village

4.   William Golding, Lord of the Flies, Ch. 9

5.   Christina Rossetti, ‘When I Am Dead, My Dearest’

6.   James Thomson, The Seasons, ‘Autumn’

7.   *

D: PARIS

1.   Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight, Part I

2.   Charlotte Mew, ‘Le sacré coeur’

3.   George du Maurier, Trilby, Ch. 1

4.   Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage

5.   James Joyce, Ulysses, Ch. 3

6.   Mary Robinson, ‘Female Fashions for 1799’

7.   *

E: READING

1.   Jilly Cooper, Imogen, Ch. 1

2.   Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Ch. 1

3.   Emily Dickinson, Poem 636

4.   Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey, Ch. 1

5.   Mimi Khalvati, ‘I’m Reading with the Light On’

6.   Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

7.   *

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MAY

A: LOVE

1.   Charlotte Mew, ‘The Farmer’s Bride’

2.   Sir Philip Sidney, ‘My true love hath my heart’

3.   Francis Bacon, ‘Of Love’

4.   Sir Walter Ralegh, ‘Walsinghame’, last stanza

5.   Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part 3

6.   Adrian Mitchell, ‘Celia, Celia’

7.   *

B: KISSES

1.   F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, Ch. 6

2.   Robert Burns, ‘Comin’ through the Rye’

3.   Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia, Ch. 1

4.   John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘A Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover’

5.   Byron, Don Juan, Canto II

6.   Leigh Hunt, ‘Jenny Kiss’d Me’

7.   *

C: MARRIAGE

1.   Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Ch. 1

2.   Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, Ch. 11

3.   Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘General Prologue’ to The Canterbury Tales (Wife of Bath)

4.   Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Ch. XXXVIII

5.   Philip Roth, The Facts, Ch. 3

6.   Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

7.   *

D: SPIDERS

1.   M. R. James, ‘The Ash Tree’

2.   Don Marquis, Archy and Mehitabel, vii, 3

3.   Iris Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream, Ch. 14

4.   Emily Dickinson, Poem 1275

5.   Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Ch.11

6.   William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, II, i

7.   *

E: FOUNTAINS

1.   D. H. Lawrence, ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’

2.   P. G. Wodehouse, The Mating Season, Ch. 3

3.   Kathleen Jamie, ‘Fountain’

4.   Katherine Philips, ‘Friendship’

5.   Katherine Mansfield, ‘Honeymoon’

6.   Aphra Behn, ‘The Disappointment’

7.   *

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JUNE

A: SUNSHINE AND MOONLIGHT

1.   Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock, Canto 1

2.   Charles Kingsley, ‘The Bad Squire’

3.   Samuel Beckett, Murphy, Ch. 1

4.   John Donne, ‘The Sunne Rising’

5.   Susan Howe, ‘Shelley’s Pen Slipped’

6.   Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 30

7.   *

B: FROGS

1.   Emily Dickinson, Poem 288

2.   John Clare, ‘Summer Images’

3.   Seamus Heaney, ‘Death of a Naturalist’

4.   Hilaire Belloc, ‘The Frog’

5.   Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle, Ch. 6

6.   Christina Rossetti, ‘A Frog’s Fate’

7.   *

C: NIGHTINGALES

1.   Charlotte Smith, ‘To a Nightingale’

2.   John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IV

3.   Oscar Wilde, ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’

4.   Mary Robinson, ‘Ode to Melancholy’

5.   William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act III, v

6.   Edward Thomas, ‘Words’

7.   *

D: SOLITUDE AND MELANCHOLY

1.   Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, Ch. 8

2.   Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ‘Conclusion’

3.   Thomas Hood, ‘Ode: Autumn’

4.   Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Ch. 1

5.   Rachel Cusk, Outline, ending

6.   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’

7.   *

E: PARTIES

1.   Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Maud: a Monodrama

2.   William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, Ch. XXIX

3.   Eileen Myles, ‘Nice Wishes’

4.   Frank O’Hara, ‘Alma’

5.   Frances Burney, Evelina, Letter 11

6.   Thomas Moore, ‘The Sylph’s Ball’

7.   *

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JULY

A: TIME

1.   W. H. Auden, ‘Our Bias’

2.   Ben Jonson, Kitely, in Every Man in His Humour, Act III, ii

3.   W. B. Yeats, The Countess Cathleen, last lines

4.   Archibald MacLeish, ‘Ars Poetica’

5.   John Keats, ‘Sonnet’ (‘After dark vapors have oppress’d our plains’)

6.   Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’

7.   *

B: OXFORD AND CAMBRIDGE

1.   Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Ch. 5

2.   William Wordsworth, ‘Oxford, May 30, 1820’

3.   Edward Gibbon, The Autobiography of Edward Gibbon

4.   Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night, ending

5.   Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels, opening

6.   Harold Pinter, Betrayal, scene 5

7.   *

C : THE SEASIDE

1.   D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, Ch.1

2.   Jane Austen, Persuasion, Vol. 1, Ch. XII

3.   John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Ch. 2

4.   Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Part 1, 3

5.   Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Bernadette’

6.   W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman, 1066 And All That, Ch. 51

7.   *

D: SUNDAY

1.   Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, p. 23

2.   John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, Ch. 1

3.   George Eliot, Middlemarch, Ch. XLVII

4.   Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Devil’s Walk’

5.   H. G. Wells, Kipps, Ch. 3

6.   George Crabbe, Tale XXI: ‘The Learned Boy’

7.   *

E: HEADACHES

1.   Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets, ‘Life of Alexander Pope’

2.   Allen Ginsberg, ‘A Supermarket in California’

3.   Sarah Perry, After Me Comes the Flood, Ch. 1, ‘Wednesday’

4.   Byron, Don Juan, Canto II, 179

5.   W. S. Gilbert, ‘Nightmare’, Iolanthe

6.   Raymond Chandler, The Long Good-Bye, Ch. 13

7.   *

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AUGUST

A: HOLIDAYS

1.   W. H. Auden, ‘August for the people…’

2.   Stanley Middleton, Holiday, Ch. 1

3.   Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, Ch. XLVI

4.   Alexander Pope, The Dunciad, Book III

5.   Beryl Bainbridge, A Weekend with Claude, Ch. 2

6.   Agatha Christie, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Ch. 1

7.   *

B: SWIMMING

1.   Deborah Levy, Swimming Home, ‘Saturday’

2.   Rev. Kilvert, Kilvert’s Diary, Friday 12 June, 1874

3.   Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, Philosophical Fancies, ‘Of the Motions of the Planets’

4.   Richard Jefferies, Bevis, Ch. 10, ‘Savages’

5.   Jocelyn Brooke, Private View, ‘Gerald Brockhurst’

6.   Joseph Conrad, ‘The Secret Sharer’

7.   *

C: KINGFISHERS

1.   Sir Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Book 3, Ch. 8

2.   Charles Olson, ‘The Kingfishers’

3.   Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act I, i

4.   Stella Gibbons, Cold Comfort Farm, Ch. 3

5.   Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘As kingfishers catch fire…’

6.   T. S. Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’

7.   *

D : KNOCKING ON DOORS

1.   Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Ch. VI

2.   William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act II, iii

3.   Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister, Ch. 2

4.   Andrea Levy, Small Island, Ch. 19

5.   D. H. Lawrence, ‘Song of a Man Who Has Come Through’

6.   Jonathan Swift, ‘Directions to Servants’

7.   *

E : EVENING

1.   William Collins, ‘Ode to Evening’

2.   Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Ch. 1

3.   Jane Taylor, ‘Evening’

4.   Jim Crace, Harvest, Ch. 3

5.   H.D., ‘Evening’

6.   Augusta Webster, Circe

7.   *

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SEPTEMBER

A: TOWN AND COUNTRY

1.   William Wordsworth, ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802’

2.   William Cowper, The Task, Book I, ‘The Sofa’

3.   Muriel Spark, The Girls of Slender Means, Ch. 1

4.   Christopher Marlowe, ‘The Passionate Sheepheard to his Love’

5.   C. Day Lewis, ‘Two Songs’

6.   John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, III

7.   *

B : POETS

1.   Christopher Logue, ‘Last Night in Notting Hill’

2.   Thomas Hardy, ‘Shelley’s Skylark’

3.   Byron, Don Juan, Canto XI, stanza LX

4.   Ben Jonson, ‘To the Memory of My Beloved the Author, Mr. William Shakespeare’

5.   John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ‘Advice to Apollo’

6.   John Aubrey, Brief Lives, Sir Edmund Waller

7.   *

C: REPETITION

1.   Lewis Carroll, ‘The Hunting of the Snark’

2.   Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘God’s Grandeur’

3.   William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, iii

4.   James Joyce, Ulysses

5.   John Dowland, ‘Say loue if euer thou didst find’

6.   A. A. Milne, song from Winnie-the-Pooh, Ch. 5

7.   *

D : MUSIC AL INSTRUMENTS

1.   Thomas Hardy, ‘Penance’

2.   Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘The Eolian Harp’

3.   W. B. Yeats, ‘The Fiddler of Dooney’

4.   John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, conclusion

5.   Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Song of the Banjo’

6.   Jean Rhys, Tigers Are Better-Looking, ‘Till September Petronella’

7.   *

E : ANGELS

1.   Jack Kerouac, On the Road, Ch. 12

2.   Ben Jonson, The Sad Shepherd

3.   Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies, Ch. 6

4.   John Milton, Paradise Regained, Book I

5.   Selima Hill, ‘Our Job is to Forget We Are Human’

6.   John Donne, ‘The Relique’

7.   *

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OCTOBER

A : CATS

1.   Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby, Ch. XLIX

2.   Thomas Gray, ‘Ode: On the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes’

3.   James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson, 1783

4.   Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno

5.   James Joyce, Ulysses, Ch. 4

6.   George Eliot, Silas Marner, Ch. 16

7.   *

B : CHEESE

1.   Anne Sexton, ‘The Fury of Cooks’

2.   James Joyce, Ulysses, Ch. 6

3.   R. S. Surtees, Handley Cross, Ch. 50

4.   R. L. Stevenson, Treasure Island, Ch. 15

5.   William Shakespeare, Henry IV Part I, Act III, i

6.   John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure, ‘Another winter menu’

7.   *

C : APPLES

1.   John Drinkwater, ‘Moonlit Apples’

2.   John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book IX

3.   George Borrow, Lavengro, Ch. 2

4.   Thomas Chatterton, Ælla (‘Thyrde Minstrelle’)

5.   W. B. Yeats, ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’

6.   Byron, Cain, Act II, ii

7.   *

D : STARS

1.   Amiri Baraka [LeRoi Jones], ‘Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note’

2.   William Blake, ‘Night’

3.   George Herbert, ‘The Starre’

4.   George Meredith, ‘Lucifer by Starlight’

5.   F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

6.   A. E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad, LII

7.   *

E : BOREDOM

1.   Philip Larkin, ‘Dockery and Son’

2.   Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Book 3, Ch. 2

3.   Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. 9

4.   Charles Lamb, ‘Poor Relations’, Last Essays of Elia

5.   Byron, Don Juan, Canto XIII

6.   George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, Ch. 13

7.   *

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NOVEMBER

A : OWLS

1.   Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat’

2.   Alice Oswald, ‘Owl Village’

3.   Gilbert White, The Natural History of Selborne, Letter XV to Barrington

4.   John Keats, ‘Ode on Melancholy’

5.   Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, Ch. III

6.   James Thomson, The Seasons, ‘Winter’

7.   *

B : BONFIRES AND FIREWORKS

1.   Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native, Ch. 6

2.   Alison Uttley, ‘Fires’, from Plowmen’s Clocks

3.   Walt Whitman, ‘A Song for Occupations’, Leaves of Grass

4.   Sylvia Townsend Warner, ‘The Fifth of November’, A Spirit Rises

5.   John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel, II

6.   Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, Ch. 1

7.   *

C : SHOPS AND SHOPPING

1.   Patricia Highsmith, Carol (or The Price of Salt), Ch. 1

2.   Saki, ‘The Toys of Peace’

3.   Christina Rossetti, ‘Goblin Market’

4.   Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders

5.   Louis MacNeice, ‘Christmas Shopping’, stanza 1

6.   Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Man with the Twisted Lip’

7.   *

D : BATHS

1.   Daniel Defoe, A Tour through England and Wales, Book II, Letter VI

2.   Thomas Hood, ‘Stanzas Composed in a Shower-bath’

3.   Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier, Ch. 3

4.   Ezra Pound, ‘The Bath Tub’

5.   Jo Shapcott, ‘In the Bath’

6.   George & Weedon Grossmith, The Diary of a Nobody, April 29, Sunday

7.   *

E : WATCHES AND CLOCKS

1.   Edgar Allan Poe, ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’

2.   William Shakespeare, ‘Sonnet 19’

3.   Charles Dickens, Master Humphrey’s Clock, Ch. 2

4.   William Wordsworth, ‘Lucy Gray’

5.   Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd, Ch. 1

6.   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ‘The Old Clock on the Stairs’

7.   *

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DECEMBER

A : DREAMS

1.   Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘Alastor; or the Spirit of Solitude’, ll. 149–154

2.   W. B. Yeats, ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’

3.   John Donne, ‘The Dream’

4.   John Keats, letter to Benjamin Bailey, November 22, 1817

5.   Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

6.   Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Ch. 1

7.   *

B : CHRISTMAS

1.   Wendy Cope, ‘19th Christmas Poem’

2.   Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, Ch. 1

3.   Henry Vaughan, ‘The True Christmas’

4.   Beatrix Potter, ‘The Tailor of Gloucester’

5.   L. Frank Baum, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, ‘Manhood’, Ch. 11

6.   James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

7.   *

C : BELLS

1.   Edmund Spenser, ‘Epithalamion’

2.   Lionel Johnson, ‘Bells’

3.   Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., CVI

4.   William Hazlitt, ‘On Criticism’

5.   Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard’

6.   John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII

7.   *

D : COMPASS POINTS

1.   John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

2.   Arthur Hugh Clough, ‘Say not the struggle…’

3.   Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, last para

4.   Thomas Babington Macaulay, ‘Horatius’, Lays of Ancient Rome

5.   Rose Tremain, The Colour, Ch. 1

6.   Elizabeth Bowen, To the North, last pages

7.   *

E : DEATH

1.   Virginia Woolf, The Waves

2.   Muriel Spark, Memento Mori, Ch. 1

3.   Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop, Ch. 71

4.   William Shakespeare, Richard II, Act III, ii

5.   William Wordsworth, ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’

6.   Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

7.   *

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VALEDICTORY

1.   James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (Thursday, 6 April 1775)

2.   Thom Gunn, ‘His Rooms in College’

3.   Sir John Harington, ‘A Comparison of a Booke, with Cheese’

4.   Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives’ Tale, Ch. IV

5.   Robert Browning, ‘Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister’

6.   Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V, 256

7.   Robert Southey, ‘Carmen Nuptiale. The Lay of the Laureate’, L’envoy

8.   Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Envoy’

9.   Arthur Hugh Clough, Amours de Voyage, conclusion

10. Roy Fisher, ‘The Making of the Book’

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