In today's news: mad fathers, rediscovered erotica
More nonsense behaviour from aggrieved militant fathers. Hey, nothing says 'this guy should have the care and custody of children' like filling Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service [Cafcass] offices with maggots, does it? - on top of making hoax bomb calls, calling a staff member 'a Nazi war criminal', and generally being 'noisy, abusive and intimidating to staff'. Yup, that is so a confidence-producing strategy.
And Infamous bonfire of Turner's erotic art revealed to be a myth:
It looks as if the notoriously prudish Ruskin, who worshipped Turner to the point of idolatry, couldn't actually bring himself to destroy his work.
Instead he buried them in paper, interring them in a tortuous numbering system he devised himself, or in the case of some detailed anatomical details of women's genitals, folding over the page to conceal them, undoubtedly with a shudder of revulsion.
Ian Warrell has now peered at 30,000 sheets of paper, matching loose sheets to their original folders and notebooks and cross-referencing with the earlier inventories, and even matching up the sealing wax marks and fold lines on paper wrappers. He is certain that the bonfire never happened.
As I have on occasion been heard to remark, messing with retrieval systems accomplishes much the same end. Sing hey for archives and archival research. And I'm not sure it's necessary to invoke fears around the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 (which was specifically supposed, until the later notorious Cockburn judgement, not to affect works of art) as any kind of explanation for the concealment.