Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. (Ecclesiastes, 1:9-10, Authorised/King James Version)
For behold:
Last night, having finished the book I was reading, and ( Read more... )

Review in the latest Literary Review of that book The Hidden Caee of Ewan Forbes (not alas fully freely available on their website) - I posted a link to an article apropos of this case last month - which actually makes explicit something that was lurking at the back of my mind.
I.e. that Forbes was not the beneficiary of some halcyon and now ( Read more... )

Review of book on abortion in early modern Italy: When Abortion Was a Necessary Sin: The history of abortion in Catholic Italy as described by Christopoulos was largely familiar from what I already knew about Protestant England, Germany, and the United States. These western contexts, which share a larger history of medical practice and Christian ( Read more... )

I am all for rediscovery of genuinely neglected, or at least 'under-recognised' and interesting writers of the modernist period who didn't perhaps fit neatly into the high modernist canon for reasons to do with issues around class, gender, race, etc: but I'm not altogether happy with the 'an Intellectual Ahead of Her Time' label here, because she ( Read more... )

Honestly, these people.
The disastrous voyage of Satoshi, the world’s first cryptocurrency cruise ship.
Okay, one's eyebrows hoist at the teeny-weeny cabins of this libertarian utopian enterprise, and the fact there are no kitchens, only the potentiality for sharing the restaurant kitchen -
I think we may guess that this is a project of the kind ( Read more... )

Apparently - this fleeted past me on Twitter a week or so ago, and is writ up here in more detail and with historical context - there are still people who are not living in caves and unaware that the Napeolonic Wars are over, who believe in dangerous menstrual toxins:
Secretly Murdering Your Husband: The one weird trick that baffled researchers.
( Read more... )

I put this on my 'interesting?' list a while ago, and I recently noted that it was Very Cheap On Kindle, so bought it.
It is, I apprehend, self-published: this is the author's website.
It's about six young women writers of the 60s who wrote plays/books that are a) now considered iconic of the period and continue to be produced/reprinted b) had ( Read more... )

An Oral History of the Lesbian Avengers - fascinating. Though with this: I also think the internal fucking fucked the Lesbian Avengers. When you start getting into relationships and you’re happier, you protest less because you’re less outraged.
I was rolling my eyes somewhat and thinking, sounds more like a whole lot of intra-organisation ( Read more... )

I've been seeing those various comments hither and yon comparing the statistical likelihood of bloodclots from vaccine to the known statistic for the Pill -
- actually I am just a little hmmmmm about that because these days, are there not quite a lot of different kinds of Pill and can one wildly generalise? Certainly Back in The Day when it was ( Read more... )