Linkspam summer in the city
Richard J Evans on history, it's all more complicated and the national curriculum.
The problems of re-enactment as a form of historical research (though I can see that it has its virtues if integrated into a broader framework).
O dear: there was an article about the research in this book in the Weekend magazine last week, and, honestly, my dearios, I could not even be arsed to lift a sprat, I was sighing so deeply ('what is good is not new, and what is new is not good': it seemed very been there and done that). I think Emma Brockes pretty well nails it:
The complicating factor, of course, is that arousal does not always equal desire.
....
[R]eading life through brain chemistry will get you only so far.
Sing it. I also rather liked the response to the extract published last week in the letters column: Women probably want not to be lumped together into one homogenous group and told what they want. Plz 2 send Mr H a golden codfish award.
Two reviews of Liz Jones' autobiography: by Suzanne Moore and Barbara Ellen, and interview with Decca Aitkenhead. Or, the category of 'woman' is large, and contains multitudes.
I have a ghastly feeling that I may end up having to read this book, for a reasons some dr rdrz may wot of.
There was much that had me nodding and going 'uhhuh' in this article on TV docos by Mary Beard: the time it takes! the tedium and the repetition! But, really? her programme had an academic researcher for a couple of weeks? a proper, academic researcher? Lucky them. (Okay, I am embittered about this at the moment because I gave a fairly full response to a researcher who was trying to establish if [a certain surgical practice] was happening in the UK in the early C20th: which as far as one can ascertain, was an absolute no-no after the mid-1860s, though there is evidence of its continuing in North America. But subsequently heard from younger colleague that researcher has clearly been badgering other historians in order to find one to say that it was happening. All I can say, vibrators not involved.) But I share her hate on 'computer graphics of exploding volcanoes or B-list actors dressed up as Romans' (or the equivalents for my own dear period of interest, which tends to be 'irrelevant clip of black and white footage').
Val McDermid's more recent work is not in the generic areas I really go for, but I so concur with this:
Because it's sometimes easier to tell certain truths in a novel than through the lens of journalism or history, future readers who want to understand what living in the UK at the beginning of the 21st century was like will turn to our crime fiction. The main reason is the breadth of the lives we encompass. Murder doesn't just touch one social group. Victims and their friends and families; witnesses; killers; cops; the media - they're all sucked in to our stories, and we learn to understand their lives too.
The flipside of that expansiveness is that there's room for writers whose concern is clearly defined groups within our society. Stuart Neville writes about contemporary Belfast, but everything he says about the present is coloured by the city's history and the way lives have been distorted and disfigured by the Troubles. Anya Lipska has launched a series that promises to take us to the heart of London's Polish community. These novels offer us the exotic within the commonplace.
I often find that crime fiction goes to places that are not on the litfic map.
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