Dr Tony Shaw

Last night, Robert Hughes told me that his mother, Flora Hughes (née Britton), died yesterday morning. She was the daughter of Reginald Perc...

Lionel Britton inscribed the above on the f.e.p. of his Spacetime Inn (1932) to his niece, Flora Britton (later Hughes), when she was 13 ye...

Karl Salsbury Wood was born at Kings Newton, Derbyshire, in 1888. He later moved to Nottingham for several years, where he worked as a pack...

May 2008 of course marks the fortieth anniversary of les événements , the often violent protests which spread across France in reaction agai...

The photo above shows Mary Ann Elizabeth Thomas, née Quartly (1866–1943) on the left, and Irza Vivian Geraldine Britton, née Thomas (1866–19...

James Kelman is one of the most important living British novelists. If not the most important. Theo Tait interviewed him for the Guardian R...

Kathleen Ethel Ivy Britton was born at Astwood Bank, on the border of Worcestershire and Warwickshire, in 1886. She was the daughter of Rich...

When Britton & Son, a legal company in Alcester (John James Britton) and Astwood Bank (Richard Waddams Nimmo Britton), went bankrupt in ...

These two images are from old postcards of Hewell Road, Redditch, although today most if not all of the houses no longer exist. They're...

Well, OK, this was in the 1970s and I was teaching in France at the time (Lycée Technique d'Etat Louis Rascol, Albi, in the Tarn), but...

The literary critic Dr Harry Slochower (1900–91) is perhaps better known for his book No Voice Is Wholly Lost (1946) rather than his Three ...

Below, I have already provided a link to this wonderful photo, although it clearly merits a more direct viewing. The above scene was taken ...

As I mentioned in a post below, Lionel Britton and Bertrand Russell wrote a number of letters to each other. One dates from about eighteen m...

Bertrand Russell was very impressed with Lionel Britton's novel Hunger and Love , to such an extent that – very unusually – he wrote a f...

There were several Thomas families in Redditch in the nineteenth century, but the relevant one here has Samuel Thomas senior as the head, a ...

Just continuing to root through what I quickly salvaged while the sale of my house on Carlton Road was going through. Did I really pay £7.50...

This photo shows one of several speakers in the former Smoke Room of the Vale Hotel, Woodthorpe, Nottingham. Of note is the 'HB' (H...

John James Britton, solicitor, minor poet, and the paternal grandfather of Lionel Britton, spent his last years (roughly 1896–1913) in Half...

Directly opposite 66 Tufnell Park Road, the house Lionel Britton owned in London, is St George's Theatre. In 2005, when I visited it wi...

This photo of me was taken by my mother Tryphena Joan Shaw (1922 –90)  in Alexandra Street, Sherwood Rise, Nottingham, in 1955. I’m just t...

The following links are to recent newspaper articles or letters about Lionel Britton: 'Family Helped Make the Town' by Robert Hughes...

Unfortunately , I didn't have the benefit of a churchwarden's guidance when I briefly visited Halford late one Saturday afternoon ...

John James Britton, the paternal grandfather of Lionel Britton, lived for about fifteen years in the small village of Halford in Warwickshi...

Lionel Britton's novel Hunger and Love has several similarities to Robert Tressell's The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists , a well-...

With the exceptions of Lord Byron (whose stay in Nottinghamshire was relatively short) and D. H. Lawrence (who is of course principal...

With all the manic energy of a permanently starved squirrel on speed, Robert Hughes continues to excavate his past (1). This time he's d...

There are a number of posts about Lionel Britton here – although this blog is by no means exclusively about him and his family: its chief in...

John A. Lee (1891-1981) was a thief and a tramp in his youth, but went on to become a writer, a politician, and one of the most well-known m...

The Forest Folk, Blidworth Lushai cottage in Bingham, Nottinghamshire, was for a time the home of the novelist James Prior Kirk, who ju...