Welcome to my site!
When I retired from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, the IT department removed the list of my publications from the university site, so here it is on my own page, along with some of my photographs (including ‘Wild encounters’).
A few words about myself
I was born in England, and educated at Oundle. I majored in Philosophy, plus French and English, at the University of Lausanne, writing a dissertation on ‘La Phénoménologie et les sciences de l’homme, étudié dans la sociologie d’Alfred Schütz’ (Phenomenology and the human sciences, studied in the sociology of Alfred Schütz).
It was the first study in Europe of the thought of Schütz, who fled Austria in the 1930s to teach at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is best known for Der sinnhafte Aubau der sozialen Welt (translated in 1967 as The Phenomenology of the Social World).
Even before I had finished my degree I was recruited to teach English at the neighbouring high school in Lausanne, the Gymnase de la Cité, and taught there for eight years. Meanwhile I became an assistant and then a tenured Lecturer in the Faculty of Letters at Lausanne and taught English literature there for ... 42 years (and loved it: the students were wonderful).
Around 1970 I became interested in the work of Mervyn Peake and I maintain a primary and secondary Peake bibliography; I have written and edited books about his life and work. Full details can be found on the Peake Studies website.
I love doing research and sharing my discoveries (like ‘A New Source for Heart of Darkness’) in books and articles; I particularly enjoy writing up the lives of people like Walter Fuller and his sisters, and women like Harriet Martineau's Miss J, who have been unjustly forgotten. Thus I wrote LOVE in the REVOLution, a series of (true) love stories from 1917. My latest biography, Codename TREASURE, is about the fifth D-Day spy Lily Sergeiev. No one has ever written her life before.