Linx
Excellent group review of 4 books on the Great War (by someone with whom I was at university, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth).
Also inflected by those scars, Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily, in which she creates different fictional destinies for her parents, not marked by the War.
Also (perhaps) one of the indirect casualties: Frances Osborne's biography of her great-grandmother, Lady Idina Sackville: Miranda Seymour suggests that the good research is not matched by the quality of the writing, alas. It's hard to invoke Nancy Mitford in your title - going mano-a-mano with her is a risk.
Another (for me) Mitfordian resonance in this review of what sounds like fascinating study by Fuschia Dunlop's of Chinese cuisine (though her name evokes Wodehouse?): - among the foods she boldly tried pigs brains are mentioned. Not that exotic, surely? Uncle Matthew offers Davey Warbeck 'pigs' thinkers' as a choice breakfast delicacy (Davey, surprise, considers them excellently nutritious) in The Pursuit of Love, and Decca in Hons and Rebels recalls her father jovially announcing to one of Nancy's aesthete friends to whom he had taken a fancy, 'Brains for breakfast, Mark' (Mark, she records, turned pale green and left the room).
Veronica Horwell is a bit sniffy about a book on Naval Wives and Mistresses by Margaret Lincoln of the National Maritime Museum. Who has, it sounds, avoided putting in those imaginative touches which V Horwell apparently considers 'feminine': I cannot adequately express my indignation at this comment:
[She}wants to perform this necromancy while subscribing to male rules about facts (sums of money are evidence, court proceedings reliable, statistics sound), and has clearly worked hard to find the stuff.
Hello, long tradition of women historians going back to the actual records (Hai, the Misses Strickland!). Why are facts and archival evidence somehow male, as opposed to using deep womynly intuition or one's mediumistis talents to conjure up the past?
Bearkeeper by Josh Lacey: YA set in Shakespearean London.
One of UK's rarest birds has its own CCTV cameras put in:
The hen harrier is now the centre of an acrimonious tussle between conservationists and gamekeepers, a situation stoked last year when two hen harriers were shot over the Queen's estate at Sandringham, Norfolk, while Prince Harry, his friend William van Cutsem and a gamekeeper were out duck shooting. All three were questioned by police but released without charge after they denied any knowledge of the incident.
According to the RSPB, the bird is the most persecuted in Britain, with large grouse moor estates being primarily responsible for keeping numbers tiny.
Bad poems sell (at least, once they have accrued history): "I don't think he would have the same impact if he was only a bit mediocre" is comment on collection of McGonagall poems for £6600. Who now bothers with the works of Alfred Austin, Poet Laureate ('Across the wires the electric message came/He is no better, he is much the same')? - against serious competition, generally reckoned Worst Poet Laureate.
Article on visit to a family court, in which the important privacy vs secrecy (and loose usage of latter term) distinction is made:
Contrary to recent publicity, this is not a closed court, hidden behind a wall of secrecy. "I get really irritated by all these stories of 'secret' courts," says Katharine Marshall, a district judge (DJ) and mother of three, specialising in family matters, who sits regularly at Wells Street. It is right that the public can't just walk in off the street and poke their noses in to other families' private business, she believes, but all FPCs are open to the press, "and it is important that the public understands what goes on".
Deborah and Derek have 13 children - and they want more. Paging Groucho Marx (apocryphal).