As the Wuhan virus reached almost all countries of the world in 2020, travel and meetings were curtailed and our autumn conference usually held in Corpus Christi College, Oxford, was re-set as a videoconference. Populations who in the pestilences of past centuries would have fled to isolation were now being instructed, ‘Stay at Home’.

In 1722 Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year recounted events in London during the Great Plague of 1665. Robinson Crusoe had emerged in print three years previously telling how for 28 years he had been in marooned isolation. Professor Valentine Cunningham writes a lead article pertaining to all this, and a miscellany of articles and reviews follows. In one of them Jewel Spears Brooker writes on the letters of T.S. Eliot to Emily Hale. The archive containing over a thousand letters was released in January 2020. Print copies of the special issue are sent to current members.

See the contents of the special issue No.33.