And I am really not sure that when GK Chesterton was going on about the people of England and whether they had or had not spoken yet, whether he included making direct debits to institutions one deemed worthy of support or pulling down statues or civil protest or, being on jury duty, acquitting people who did the latter, as the sort of speech acts ( Read more... )

Goodness knows one gets some very weird people rather tangentially connected to the world of academe following one via academia.edu, but today there was somebody in W Africa, who appears to be based at a real institution, but also to be touting a SECRET OCCULT ORGANISATION FOR WEALTH AND POWER WITHOUT NO HUMAN KILLINGS. Hmmmm.
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In more srs ( Read more... )

Working with your hands: the secret to happiness?. Oliver Burkeman does perceive that there's a certain amount of dodgy gender stuff going on in these paeans to Real Manly Work fixing motorbikes and masoning stone, but doesn't take it further either in the direction of ( Read more... )

William Cowper
PITY FOR POOR AFRICANS (1788)
I own I am shock'd at the purchase of slaves ( Read more... )

James Fenton, Was Shakespeare, or was his father, a Catholic, or a crypto-Catholic?:
Were they connected to Jesuit missionaries operating undercover in Warwickshire? These questions are asked in an article in the TLS of March 16. The answer to the latter question appears to be a resounding raspberry, which is interesting, since the authors of the ( Read more... )

A rather annoying piece in today's Guardian Review by Brenda Maddox, biographer of Rosalind Franklin (and, if I recall correctly, of Nora Barnacle Joyce): There have been women with brilliant scientific minds, but far fewer than men.

Um, first question: how do we know that there have been far fewer women with BSM than men, given the restricted ( Read more... )