When somebody describes something as transcending a particular genre.
I have the strongest suspicion that the subtext is, 'I don't actually read [particular genre], good heavens, no, what do you take me for, but I like this particular [book/author], so I will say it rises above the common ruck of which I have no actual firsthand knowledge'.
Wot, me ( Read more... )

Will the 'culture warriors' start woezering about the National Trust (you know, that evil 'woke' institution the National Trust) doing this? Bat on a non-slip roof: National Trust adapts manor for nocturnal residents: Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk gives tiles a special coating to stop bats slipping off as part of £6m roofing project: The trust on ( Read more... )

Apparently - I think this may have been reported before? 'Albanian Sworn Virgins' are a dying breed: With More Freedom, Young Women in Albania Shun Tradition. One also rather hopes that it is not just that they can go to the big city and get jobs outside the pressures of a patriarchal family system, but that it no longer pertains that the area is ( Read more... )

I see this actually dates back some years, but my flabber is still ghasted: It's Frustratingly Rare to Find a Novel About Women That's Not About Love: "Literary girls don't take road-trips to find themselves; they take trips to find men."
('Literary girls': shudder.)
Ummm: over a long and misspent life - misspent, I may add, reading ALOT, we have ( Read more... )

Well, at least Richard Dawkins didn't think Metamorphosis was actually a work on entomology? - or maybe he did, and somebody said, 'No, Richard, it's fiction' and he was trying to work out how that worked? I picture him as one of those children in Victorian stories taught on the Grandgrindian method, or coming further up to date, along the lines ( Read more... )

Hadley Freeman in today's Guardian Weekend is miffed off at male columnists dissing on not just Nancy Mitford and The Pursuit of Love but anyone (silly gurliez!!) who enjoys it.
Okay, yet again this is men crapping on anything that women dare to like that they do not.
But I also take exception, or at least have problems with, the blanket dismissal ( Read more... )

Apparently some young (I think he must be relatively young?) bloke writer whose own career must so far be as the mayfly's compared to hers, has delivered himself of his opinion re Virginia Woolf (do we not think, my dearios, that Mrs W would have had him for breakfast and then desired a full English to fill up the space?): Woolf’s novels are not ( Read more... )

If it's not that women writing (or at least, publishing bookses) was completely unknown until the advent of one woman in the 1990s who publishes under initials/a male pseudonym and features male protags (according to a person who got their head handed to them and a very comprehensive education in literary history going back to the Sumerians on ( Read more... )

At this rather gloomy time of the year, I was rather charmed to open the latest issue of Literary Review, which can be rather uneven, and has, indeed, something in the way of form for ponceyness and higher codswallop in the opening 'Diary' page, which tends to be by very various hands.
But this month, Philip Hensher comes good in praise of ( Read more... )

The ever excellent and incisive Anne Billson: Anna Karina, Catherine Deneuve: how movies malign women by calling them muses.
Amid tributes to Anna Karina, who died earlier this month, the word “muse” recurred. As in “the muse of Jean-Luc Godard” or “Karina served as a cinematic muse to Godard”. And in nearly every homage and obituary, you could ( Read more... )