Peter introduces the blog, June 2010

Doing this blog is something of an experiment. It’s not quite a “running commentary” on what I’m reading and discovering and how I research here in the library. Instead, each entry is like a little nugget where I present something from my research, encouraging you to “look at this – I think it’s extraordinary and here’s why”.


The blog is arranged in sequences of ten or more entries on a single topic, like Murray’s publications on the search for the Northwest Passage, each sequence or theme contains my way of seeing it…that is in turn mediated through a dramatist’s responses to material. I’m not an historian, after all. I’m a playwright. So the entries are personal to that degree.


As to how I’d hope people might use the blog,  it’s not so much on the serial basis of most blogs. I’d like to encourage you to browse it, look back and forward from whatever entry point you find, so that you too can explore just some of what the John Murray Archive has to offer through my own encounters with the collection.  “Playwright in the Cages” is…a kind of illuminated catalogue of a corner of one collection amidst the many collections of the library. 
 I will chose things to look at on the basis of the energy and excitement they communicate to me…It’s an experiment, as I say. I’d really encourage people to have a look and get in touch…because this is really new territory for all of us…I hope you will join us on my journey...
Already posted…lots of stuff responding to the holdings on Byron and Caroline Lamb…including a ten part poetic response to the Blue Commonplace Book of Caroline lamb, certainly one of the strangest and most interesting things I’ve ever had by paws on. Hot off the press…the search for the North West Passage and The Man who Ate His Boots…and next up, Alexander Burnes, Our Man in Bokhara…and the First Afghan War…
Can’t wait…