Boy o boy, the Hughes literary estate just keeps on giving, doesn't it? We note that they have sold off the Hughes papers in two lots, to Emory University and the residue to the British Library, for not insignificant sums, but still retain a fierce grip on the actual copyright.

Having authorised someone to write a 'literary life', copyright per has ( Read more... )

Given to think, by this post by yuki_onna, that some people seem to think it's easy-peasy to decide what acts are selfish and which unselfish.

But while this may be something that looks easy when judging some immediate action, within a larger view of the scheme of things it may not be that simple. (Can I invoke George Eliot's image of looking through ( Read more... )

(Small earthquake in Brno.)

Mendel family and Augustinian Order duke it out over manuscript of Mendel's paper on his pea-breeding experiments.

I'm puzzled as to why it should be a German cultural treasure. (Okay, have checked and the Mendel family were ethnic Germans living in what, at that time, was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

And even ( Read more... )

I'm a bit surprised not to have seen anything around these parts about the big Jane Austen fight that's been all over the papers here: it was reported a couple of weeks ago in The Guardian, and I was reminded of it when I came across it in the columns of a recent issue of the THE: Times Higher Education, having migrated from the columns of the ( Read more... )

Finally finished reading through the thesis I am examining about which I posted the other day, and it's not just my articles that are not, ahem, engaged with: including one that would, apart from anything else, have given helpful hints on some influential contemporary debates to look at, compare, and contrast. There are at least two major journal ( Read more... )

On reflection, my reaction to the 'what's wrong with public libraries' question boiled down to the same reaction I've had to similar phenomena in other spheres. It's not so much that I'm saying 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' or that outreach per se or extension of services is a bad thing, but that what I perceive is a failure to engage with a ( Read more... )

Rather belatedly correcting proofs of an Oxford DNB article (they arrived while I was off work), and see that these still come with that Really Annoying Lowercasing Of Things Which Should Be Capitalised, Dammit! They seem (or maybe the software system sets protocols that make them do it) to have decided that uppercasing is for personal and place- ( Read more... )