A little linkspam with the mulled wine, perhaps?
Vogue launches online archive of every American issue in its 119-year history. Yeah, okay, $1,575 is a lot for a year's subscription from the point of view of the individual punter interested in the history that this could disclose: but in terms of what academic journals and some of the other major press databases cost it's minute.
Bluuuuue Moooooon: Deborah Orr says something I agree with rather than just going 'meh' and turning the page: Women should be able to choose to end a pregnancy without having to pretend that continuing it would drive them to despair. Sing it.
Simone Webb (aged 18), Underage sex isn't automatically a problem. Young women are not uniquely vulnerable. What's important is that anyone having sex at any age should be making a free and informed choice. So true.
Interesting piece about scientists and reputation - the issues are hardly confined to the worlds of the sciences:
[E]ngraving their names in stone and bronze creates difficulties. It forces us to make them unblemished icons, or conversely tempts us to demonize them. This rush to beatify brings down a weight of moral expectation few of us could shoulder.
Can I just say aaaaargh to this claim from Sue Arnold's review of an audiobook version of the recent bio of Wallis Simpson, apropos the state of sexual ignorance in interwar Britain, 'The Technique of Sex, the first manual on the subject, published in 1939, sold half a million copies in hardback alone and remained in print for 50 years', demonstrating a sad lack of knowledge of the history of the sex manual in the UK (Marie Stopes's Married Love, 1918, Theodor van de Velde's Ideal Marriage, English translation, by Stella Browne, 1928... do I need to go on?).
Jonathan Jones gets poncey about illuminated manuscripts:
Books have never been cherished more than they were in the middle ages. The exhibition at the British Library is a window on a world when the written word was truly valued and reading truly mattered. We, who may be witnessing and participating in the death of the book as an object, are in no position to patronise these medieval readers who adored their books so much they wanted their pages to be glorified with gold. The golden books of the middle ages survive from a world that saw learning as light.
As we see the ambiguous - to say the least - consequences for the book of the technological revolution of our time, a technocratic approach to European intellectual history makes little sense. Printing does not equal progress. European culture was supposedly liberated by printing in the 15th and 16th centuries. Print meant more readers, a greater reach for new books, the standardisation of editions of old ones. It created a new world of publishing that has endured for half a millennium. But were these changes all for the good? In reality, it can be argued, the greatest age of learning was the era of the illuminated book.
Please to pass me a tastefully illuminated codfish to adminster a higher codswallop to Mr Jones.
Rereading: What Shall We Have for Dinner? As the celebrations for Charles Dickens's bicentenary next year begin in earnest, spare a thought this Christmas for his wife, Catherine, who published her own book of dinner menus:
The selection shows considerable culinary interest and knowledge. The grand menus are fascinating, requiring a grasp of seasonality (Catherine gives the months that each menu could be served) and a practical understanding of what a female cook (rather than a trained chef) working with limited oven and stove-top space in an urban kitchen could produce.
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