What I read
This was a week in which there was a confluence of the latest issues of The Scribbler, The Literary Review, and Slightly Foxed, so all those got read (or, in part, skimmed - the LR these days seems to review quite a lot of things in which my interest is somewhat minimal).
Finished The Poison Court - this was one of those times when, ( Read more... )

And pontificate generally. A certain Mr J- J- who writes on ART in The Guardian yet again makes us ask, what are they teaching them in art-critic school these days, or possibly back in the 1950s?
Godwin encouraged his daughter’s own feeling for art, taking her to studios including that of JMW Turner. But painting, like making a monster, was a man’s ( Read more... )

The book that made me a feminist.
I mean, did they not realise that they were feminists before then?
I remember coming across the term in, it was either Girls' Crystal or Schoolfriend - which were not the girls' comics we had bought for us, but had passed along by, I think, my mother's friend along the street who had a daughter a few years older ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished A Banquet of Consequences, and, okay, family that makes the Starkadders look like the Waltons at the centre of the plot. But at least Havers is somewhat on the way to rehabilitation and not being transferred, and while I am not convinced by Lynley's new affair (I consider his new squeeze is entirely prudent to maintain high ( Read more... )

This bug or whatever is lingering on, not bad enough to stay off work, just feeling under par and lacking in oomph.
What I read
Found Alison Lurie, The Last Resort, as good as I remembered. Though although this is only 1998, I can't help thinking that these days, the aging popular ecology writer struggling to finish a book about a tree might at ( Read more... )

O, Talbot Baines Reed, could you be any more obvious 'Victorian boys' school slash' about your titles? - added today on Project Gutenberg, The Cock-House at Fellsgarth and Tom, Dick, and Harry. Am reminded of short story by, I think, JIM Stewart in which nephew of elderly unmarried scientist of distinction believes him to have been collecting ( Read more... )

Will admit, did have a few DYKWIA moments at the recent conference, even though there is no particular reason why people who work on medieval/early modern stuff in my general areas should KWIA.

But a few recent events have given me to think about people Who Don't Know Who I Am Not - which is surely easily checkable by a fairly cursory glimpse of my ( Read more... )

Crime-writers names their favourite authors/shamuses: yay for Paretsky naming Georgia Strangeways!

It's a pity that the Guardian's crime reviewer seems to think a tired old trope that probably got name-checked in the Detective Club's list of don't along with mysterious arrow poisons, is a new hot thing: 'amnesia is set fair to become the crime ( Read more... )

( Non-fiction )

First, a poll*

View poll: Byzantine Empiress
(okay, I will concede, dr rdrs, that you, and I, may constitute a statistically odd group for our bodies of knowledge.)

( But, just in case this topic happens to be outwith yours )