Just finished
Peter Hales' Atomic Spaces is a really fascinating social history of the Manhattan Project: how it was administered, policed, regulated, even how landscapes were shaped by it. There are not nearly enough sociocultural histories of wartime and this one felt very unique: when I discovered that the author is an art/architectural ( Read more... )

Actually on Wednesday, who'd have thought it? I just got back yesterday from my visit to New York City, so I still have a lot of comments and emails to reply to. Please bear with me.

Just finished

Ernest Raymond, Tell England. Second half is all about the glory and nobility of fighting at Gallipoli (?!?), while the first half is a classic ( Read more... )

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* There is not a single Laurie/Andrew fic on the AO3. Isn't this... slightly odd?

* So the Plymouth Brethren were/are a peace church. This stunned me a bit, though perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. It makes the symmetry between Ralph and Andrew all the greater: Andrew, the pacifist who comes from a family of soldiers, and Ralph the sailor ( Read more... )

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I was about to tag my latest Charioteer fic with "het not straight" when I realised that the collection is only for pairings where at least one character is "bisexual/pansexual/omnisexual." This surprised me though probably it shouldn't have, as I know I've seen this discussed before ( Read more... )

Just picked this up from the library, since I enjoyed (for a given value of "enjoy") his biography of John Lennon. Naturally I immediately flipped ahead to see what he said about Andrew Loog Oldham...

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It looks as if the J. Edgar Hoover movie is actually coming out in November... possibly slightly too late to be nominated as a Yuletide fandom, although I'm not convinced of that.

More links here, including posters, a trailer, and disagreement between Clint Eastwood and Dustin Lance Black about the gay content of the film ( Read more... )

You might be familiar with the work of Christopher Isherwood at a remove, via "Cabaret." You might have read Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, the novels about interwar Berlin on which "Cabaret" was based. You might have seen the recent BBC production Christopher and His Kind, with Matt Smith of Doctor Who fame playing the title ( Read more... )

Given the recent kerfuffle about gay YA novels (or the lack thereof), I just have to re-recommend David Blaize. It's part of that genre of remarkably queer boarding school stories that flourished in the Victorian period and into the early twentieth century, surviving until romantic friendship went out of fashion and outside observers suddenly ( Read more... )