A dainty dish of linkspam
Next Thursday is, apparently, World Book Day (only one day? for some of us it's every day): Lucy Mangan thinks about this. May I say (and I am sure, dear readers, that many of you will concur) that black t-shirts saying 'Fuck Off, I'm Reading', would be a totally brilliant idea - though alas, probably would not deter that class of person who is so very NQOSD and asks the engrossed reader 'what are you reading/is it a good book?' etc. For maximum impact, the message should be on the back, no?
(And further on cool/not-cool, Oliver Burkemann is not particularly interesting on Is it really hip to be glum?)
A. S. Byatt, however, is riveting on Alice and golden-age children's lit generally.
This review suggests that The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders might actually get certain things right that are often got wrong, by, e.g. not speculating about the subject's inner motivations. On the other hand, it might be yet again freighting something relatively slight with weight it cannot bear.
Maybe this is a good book, and I do feel a significant sympathy with Lezard's comment about 'that shivering, abandoned child, the enlightenment project', but I can't help thinking that Alan Sokal maybe needs to let it go.
This perhaps resonates with Ben Goldacre's column pointing out that if the evidence is clearly against the effectiveness of homeopathy, quite a bit of allopathy's claims rest on shaky evidential foundations. On a related issue, Simon Singh and his fight for freedom of speech versus the libel laws.
Book reviews roundup, including those of the new, and apparently rather more sympathetic, biography of Arthur Koestler. Even this one however doesn't incline the reviewers to a terribly favourable view of Koestler, and I, along with Dominic Sandbook, am completely beswozzled by the invocation of the 'he was a man of his time' defence.
Leap Year ticks all the Hollywood cliche boxes when it comes to Irish movies: reviewer completes a whole article on this without mentioning The Quiet Man, surely the locus classicus for the trope of the epic fight, duh.
Kathryn Hughes considers the Amis/Ford dingdong in the light of the long tradition of literary feuds splashing over from the personal to the public sphere.
I am inclined to agree with the commenter on this review: 'Five stars?! Is this a late-life crisis, Michael?!' as Michael Billington finds a burlesque show 'a refreshing alternative to Ibsen'. Depends, I would say, how director and whoever's playing Nora interpret the tarantella scene....
I liked Hugh Muir's Hideously Diverse Britain yesterday on playing the race/gender card, in which everyone seems to think their own hand is hopeless but various other groups hold the royal flush. Weir concludes:
A trump card doesn't exist, but some cards give the holder a better than even chance of winning. Oh to be a white, middle-class, straight male.
And further beswozzlement: I divorced my cheating ex but his parents don't know. Should I tell them?
Forty years since first ever National Women's Liberation Conference, which took place at Ruskin College, Oxford, between 27 February and 1 March 1970.
African origin of Roman York's rich lady with the ivory bangle
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