Recently finished:

Blood of Dragons, Robin Hobb - last of the Rain Wild Chronicles. Enjoyable; not as wrenching or impressive a series or conclusion as there is to the Tawny Man or the Liveship books, but reasonably satisfying.
( some niggles - spoilers )

The Broadland Archives at Southampton University include Mountbatten papers, Palmerston's travel diaries and other papers, including letters from Queen Victoria, and a lot of other material. The Trustees of the Archives are selling them, and the university are trying to raise £2.85 million to keep them. More details hereAnd here's a picture of ( Read more... )

because not only have we moved house, I have moved offices as well, and my life entirely consists of boxes and 'where's the...?'. But thought some of my flist might be interested that the Henslowe-Alleyn papers have been digitised.

Alternatively, here are some dancing penguins.

As a follow-up to a work conference on the Cold War, we set up a trip to RAF Upper Heyford about ten days ago, where the US Strategic Air Command were based until the early 1990s. (Here's the Wikipedia article, but I warn you that the preamble at least is bizarre, apparently written by someone wanting to pay off a grudge against ungrateful local ( Read more... )

In honour of Ada Lovelace Day, (see also oursin's post, I thought I would look through the recently added Lives of 215 people who died in 2005 to the Dictionary of National Biography, and see which women working in science and technology were there. I found five.

Two reasonably well-known ones:

Cicely Saunders (1918-2005), who started to train as a ( Read more... )

I have a lengthy post half-written about The Dig, Sutton Hoo and The Dark is Rising, but in the meantime thought some of you might be interested in the ODNB's commemoration of 14 December 1918, the first time a woman was elected to the British House of Commons and indeed the first election in which women could stand as candidates and vote (if over ( Read more... )

white_hart posted yesterday about the anniversary of women first getting the vote in the UK, and one of my colleagues was speaking at an event about this yesterday. She came in today with a big poster showing all the constituencies where women are currently or have ever been elected - and all those where they haven't. It's on the Electoral Reform Society's ( Read more... )

A website and a blog about children who were at a Welsh TB sanatorium in the 1920s to 1950s. Probably mostly for Chalet fans, but there are some good photographs.

Slightly disappointed to discover that although Wendy Cope has a new book coming out this year, it's an annotated selection mainly from the three previous Faber collections, rather than ( Read more... )

The Cutty Sark is being restored after the fire in May. Apparently the damage could have been much worse:
as Stephen Archer, of Cutty Sark Enterprises, explained, the ship's construction - teak timbers mounted on an iron frame - ensured the remainder of the vessel survived relatively unscathed ( Read more... )

Thought some of you might be interested in this exhibition at the Women's Library:

Sinners, Scroungers, Saints: Lone mothers past and present
From First World War widows to the 'Vicky Pollard' stereotype of teenage mothers, Sinners, Scroungers, Saints explores the ways in which lone mothers have been represented over time ( Read more... )