Linking
Kathryn Hughes reviews The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the 14th Century by Ian Mortimer:
Mortimer knows what he is doing. He has previously written three very well received biographies of medieval kings which are both readable and erudite (much rarer in popular writing about the middle ages than you might think). His background as a professional archivist throws a cloak of probity over a project which might otherwise have veered towards Ladybird territory. If he sometimes cites a secondary text which seems to be growing whiskers - for instance WG Hoskins's 1953 classic on the English landscape - then you feel reassured that no other source will quite do.
Stevie Davies reviews Elizabeth Jane Howard's Love All: noteworthy for the following reason, that it appears to centre on cross-generation affection between women:
Erotic attachment in a novel pretty well devoid of testosterone cannot hold a candle to the radiant kindness between aunt and niece. Persephone and Floy are the book's heart. This is a radical and important literary move - so it's a pity the other characters usurp so many pages, talking among themselves so garrulously.
When Persephone "glanced at her aunt with a fondness that changed her face entirely", a bystander envies that look. He should. In a world of stint and unworthiness, this filial, familial, overarching concern eclipses romantic ardour. Arrestingly, Howard models the relationship on Stevie Smith's attachment to her "Lion Aunt": Floy is Percy's "Pirate Aunt", a figure of energy and brio. She is quite simply the salt of the earth. There is something of the Greek myth of the flower-maiden Persephone and her mother, the corn goddess Demeter, that brings back Milton's narrative of Persephone's detention in the underworld.
Hadley Freeman suggests that, of all people, Jackie Collins gets closer to the experience of prostitution than 'Belle De Jour'.
Nicholas Lezard's Choice this week is a book about reading, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf, which sounds fascinating even if the author has only read Middlemarch half a dozen times and even if Lezard thinks this is remarkable.
And on reading, Lucy Mangan has a good word for Enid Blyton:
Denying me Blyton wouldn't have made me seek out the classics any faster. I would have missed a vital lesson in the glorious pleasures that easy reading can bring.
Court ruling hailed as refuting 'rape myth':
Judges in rape trials can explain that the trauma of an attack can cause "shame and guilt" which deters victims from going to the police immediately, the court of appeal ruled yesterday. A delay in making a rape allegation is one of the factors most frequently relied on by defendants to try to undermine victims' credibility.
The judgement in question,
arose from an unsuccessful appeal by a man convicted of six rapes.
John Doody's lawyers had argued that the trial judge in his case, having explained in his summing up why a woman may delay making a rape complaint, should have told the jury at Wolverhampton crown court that some women fabricated rape allegations for their own purposes.
Yeah, all six of them? Huh.
Ben Goldacre on publishing the same results more than once.
For some obsessives, however, this is one of the two worst weekends of the year: should you be in possession of 3500 antique clocks taking two days to reset. (Doin' the tick-tock boggle.)
[T]he School of Life, a new cultural enterprise offering "ideas to live by" is challenging these assumptions about where we should spend our vacations.
This weekend it is organising a mini-break on the M1, to "unearth the story of the motorway's construction, reveal the poetry of its monumental architecture, dine in its historic service stations and recover the utopian thrill of its early days". The sightseers will meet historians, architects and one of the original serving staff at Leicester Forest East. A holiday at Heathrow is also in the offing.
At last, I appear to be ahead of a trend. As a historian of daily life, I have visited unexciting places for ages.
Somehow this reminds me of Stephen Potter's Lifemanship and related works.
Thinking about Adam and Eve's sex life in the Garden of Eden can be spiritually enriching, says Theo Hobson
Famous weaver dies:
On his return to Britain, he spent six months at Ditchling, East Sussex, in the workshop of Ethel Mairet, then the best-known weaver in Britain. He thought that she had accepted him as a pupil because she was intrigued that a man wanted to weave, even though she once called him "the dullest man I have ever met".
I do wonder, a tad cynically, if all the kudos and recognition he accrued would have fallen to the lot of an eminent female artist weaver...
This does not sound like a book I want to read (twee alert or what?), but I just want to record this quote from it:
"Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she's covered in quills, a real fortress, but . . . on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant."