Identity area
Reference code
Watson/5/28
Unique identifier
Title
Date(s)
- 1957 - 2004 (Creation)
Level of description
Subseries
Extent and medium
Paper.
Context area
Name of creator
Biographical history
George Grimes Watson was born in Brisbane, Australia, on 13 October 1927. He was educated at Brisbane Boys' College and the University of Queensland, where he graduated in 1948 with a degree in English. He secured a scholarship for a second degree and received an English degree from Trinity College, Oxford in 1950; he worked for the European Commission as an interpreter before becoming a lecturer in English at Cambridge in 1959 and a Fellow of St John's College in 1961. He remained at St John's until his death on 2 August 2013.
Watson edited 'The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature'. As well as producing wide-ranging literary and cultural criticism, he was involved in leftist politics, campaigning as a Liberal candidate in 1959 and 1979 and working as Editor for the Unservile State Group; his political writing often critiques socialism from a liberal perspective.
Repository
Archival history
Immediate source of acquisition or transfer
Content and structure area
Scope and content
This subseries gathers typescripts of articles by George Watson not represented earlier in the series. Items will ultimately be catalogued individually; for now, a list follows.
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‘Coleridge’s Notebooks’, review of ‘The Notebooks of S.T. Coleridge’, edited by Kathleen Coburn (circa 1957)
'English by Radio: Talk for Teachers – English at Oxford' (circa 1950-1960)
‘The Identity of Europe’ (circa 1961-1964)
‘Joseph Butler and the Ethic of Self’ (circa 1964)
‘Kubla Khan’ (for ‘Studies in Romanticism’) (circa 1967)
'Dinner with the Duke', a dramatic dialogue between the Duke of Wellington and Earl Stanhope (unknown date; estimated 1969, the centenary of Wellington's death)
One page from 'The Reader in Clarendon's "History of the Rebellion"' (for 'The Review of English Studies') (1974)
‘The Voice of Gray’ (‘Critical Quarterly’ 19) (1977)
'Scourge for the Sixties', review of Diana Trilling's 'We Must March My Darlings: A Critical Decade' (circa 1977)
Review of Brian Fothergill’s ‘Beckford of Fonthill’ (circa 1979)
‘Viewpoint’ and ‘An End to Evaluation?’ (‘Times Literary Supplement’) (1980)
‘Hawk or Airman?’, review of Edward Mendelson’s ‘Early Auden’ (circa 1981)
‘One Donne’, review of John Carey’s ‘John Donne: Life, Mind and Art’ (circa 1981)
‘The Chambers of Memory’, review of Michael Millgate’s ‘Thomas Hardy: a biography’ (1982)
‘Far Other Worlds’, review of T A Shippey’s ‘The Road to Middle-earth’ (circa 1982)
‘Book of the Year’, discussing Paul Joannides’s ‘Drawings of Raphael’ (1983)
‘The Cult of Revolution’, review of Ronald Paulson’s ‘Representations of Revolution 1789-1820’ (circa 1983)
‘Remembering the Trenches’, review of ‘Siegfried Sassoon Diaries 1915-1918’, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis, ‘The War Poems of Sassoon’ arranged and introduced by Rupert Hart-Davis, Sassoon’s ‘Sherston’s Progress’ and Stephen MacDonald’s ‘Not about Heroes’ (circa 1983)
Review of J B Yeats’s ‘Letters to His Son W.B. Yeats and Others 1869-1922’ (circa 1983)
‘Staircase Wit’, review of Laurence and Helen Fowler’s ‘Cambridge Commemorated: An Anthology of University Life’ (circa 1984)
‘Book of the Year’, discussing Douglas Dunn’s ‘Elegies’ and Robert Latham’s ‘Shorter Pepys’ (1985)
‘The Cambridge Phenomenon’, review of A J Ayer’s ‘Wittgenstein’ and Norman Malcolm’s ‘Wittgenstein: A Memoir’ (circa 1985)
‘Sigmund and Anna’, review of ‘The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess’, edited by J M Masson, and Uwe Henrik Peters’s ‘Anna Freud: A Life Dedicated to Children’ (circa 1985)
‘Cuckoo in the Nest’, review of ‘The Notebooks of Samuel Butler’, edited by Henry Festing Jones (‘The Eagle’) (1986)
‘The Great Survivor’, review of R.P. Graves’s ‘Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895-1926’ (1986)
‘The Wright Darwin’ (‘The Eagle’) (1986)
‘Ending up in London’, review of Christopher Hope’s ‘The Hottentot Room’ (circa 1986)
‘Marvellous Middle Age’, review of Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Chatterton: A Novel’ (circa 1987)
Review of ‘The Poems of Tennyson’, edited by Christopher Ricks (circa 1987)
‘Unmarxist Fictions’, review of Franco Moretti’s ‘The Way of the World’ (circa 1987)
Review of Alexander Robertson’s ‘Atkinson Grimshaw’ (circa 1988)
‘The New from New York’, review of Fred Kaplan’s ‘Dickens: A Biography’ (circa 1988)
‘A Yank at Oxford’, review of ‘Logan Pearsall Smith: An Anthology’, edited by Edward Burman (1989)
Peter Stern obituary (‘The Eagle’) (1992)
‘The Story of C.S. Lewis’ (post-1998)
Review of Roland Hill’s ‘Lord Acton’ (circa 2000)
‘The Sphinx That Talked’, review of Isaiah Berlin’s ‘The Soviet Mind: Russian Culture under Communism’ (circa 2004)
A page of 'Deathless and Birthless' on one side, and a page of 'The Trope: Hugh Trevor-Roper' on the other (circa 2010)
'The Three Ages', a poem 'after Goethe' (undated)