• Eton College holds a valuable and interesting collection of Browning related material which the College will kindly display for members after the meeting. Tea will be provided.

• A lunch to celebrate Robert Browning's birthday will be held at Durrants Hotel. Please be advised that numbers must be very limited and that places will have to be allocated on a first come first served basis.

•  The festival is a hugely enjoyable event and well worth a visit any time during its two weeks which are always the first two weeks of July. Do keep the dates of the Festival in your diaries and details of the Browning Society event will be posted on the website as soon as possible. A full festival programme is usually available in early May.

• The Church will incorporate a commemoration of the Browning's marriage into their service as in 2004. The society has commissioned a new anthem for the service and this will be the first opportunity to hear this new work.

• An international, interdisciplinary conference on the complex cultural interchanges between Anglo-Saxon expatriates in Italy and their host country during the turbulent, important period of Italian unification. ‘Our Italians', is so-called because of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's affection for her adopted country. She was devoted to Italy, its history, its culture, its people: ‘I love it and with somewhat of the kind of blind, stupid, respectable, obstinate love which people feel when they talk of “beloved native lands”. I feel this for Italy by mistake for England.' This conference will take place and accommodation will be provided in the Abbey and Foresteria, the former Abbey guest-house, of Vallombrosa. The Abbey lies high in the hills thirty kilometers from Florence and was visited by John Milton in 1638 and since then has attracted great numbers of literary tourists, including the Brownings and John Ruskin. The three day conference promises to be the highlight of 2005 for the Society and we all hope that as many members as possible will be able to enjoy this extraordinary opportunity to meet with each other and with international scholars and enthusiasts from a wide variety of disciplines. Do check the Society website for further details and do note that the numbers are limited for this conference.

• The annual commemoration of Robert Browning's death will take place at Westminster Abbey at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday December 13th. We hope to arrange a reception to follow where the winner of the Poetry Competition 2005 will be presented and will read the winning entry.
  
  It is hoped that another academic conference of real interest to Society members and friends will take place this autumn at University College London. The subject of the conference, the third of the La Prude Angleterre meetings exploring the cross-currents between Anglo and French cultures in the 19th century, will be medievalism in the 19th century in France and Britain. The conference is still in the planning stages but will include the participation of four departments of University College London, History, History of Art, French and English. The subject is wide-ranging and will be sure to attract much interest internationally and throughout Britain. Details will be posted on the Society website when they become available.
  
  Other events will take place throughout the year but have yet to be set in the calendar. In particular the Committee hopes to host small, informal gatherings such as the successful ‘Browning and a Bottle' evening of poetry readings. These occasions give us a chance to meet and share our enjoyment of the Brownings' poetry and lives in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere. We hope in the early summer to hold a ‘Picnic and Poem' day when we will follow a walk tracing Robert Browning's accustomed route to friends' homes and other points he enjoyed in West London, ending in Holland Park for a picnic and readings of our own favourite pieces. Again in the autumn another ‘Browning and a Bottle' evening, where we enjoy a light supper, bring a bottle of wine and our chosen poem to share, may take place. Members will be informed of details of these events as soon as they are ava