The PENguin Blog

I can’t believe it has been two weeks since last I updated. Apologies. We have been doing a lot, as the next few entries will show, and our time in Bath, and our semester, is drawing to a close. Thursday, April 23, took us to our next but last student excursion, a tripleheader, as it were, to Lacock Abbey and to Stonehenge and Avebury. It was a crowded day, a bit rushed, but, I think, worth it in terms of the experience. Felicity, who was our guide in Bath and Bristol, took us through the village and abbey. The abbey dates back to the early thirteenth century and continued as the centre of a prosperous medieval woolen village until Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monastaries. It was converted into a home in the mid sixteenth century and later came into the hands of the Talbot family, who gave it to the nation, through the National Trust after World War II. Because of its age and beauty the abbey and the village are often featured in films, most notably the Harry Potter series. Fr...

We spent a quiet Easter at “home”in Bath. Because we were just back from Germany and Sharon was sick and provisions were not readily available (excuses) we did not have a Seder, but instead quietly acknowledged the Passover. Usually we acknowledge the dual heritage by celebrating both Passover and Easter. For Easter we did go “all out,” attending Good Friday services at Bath Abbey and Easter services there as well. Afterward, we joined our students in Royal Victoria Park for an Easter Picnic. My colleague, Andy Fleck, was off delivering a paper in Washington at a Shakespeare conference (gotta love the timing of these things), so we asked his wife Barbara Zimbalist to join us for dinner. It was a pleasant day. We are now in the last three weeks of this adventure (although Sharon and I will stay on for another month independently). I find it hard to believe how quickly the time has passed. As my students might say, WTF? Look up Sophie Ryder. Her stuff is everywhere in Bath these da...

Berlin. I’m not sure where to start. I have seen a few of the great cities of the world and have images of the many I have not visited. But only in retrospect do I realise that until now I had no image of Berlin. Part of that may be my own ignorance of the city which was the Prussian capital of Frederick the Great and that of Wilhelmine Germany. I had bits and pieces of images of Berlin, snapshots of the twenties when it was not just the capital of a wrecked Germany, but a center of art and architecture and the decadence of the early twentieth century, scenes based on the tortured writings Albert Speer in which he tried to explain his architecture for the Third Reich, images of cold war Berlin, wrecked, divided and under siege. But I had no real sense of the place. Now I do, or at least I think I do. Honestly, both Sharon and I found Berlin overwhelming. In part it may have been because we arrived, both of us, suffering from colds we had picked up at the beginning of the week. ...