Kent has second highest number of UFO sightings in the country: The most recent Ministry Of Defence data show the Garden of England's 30 reports was second only to London's 38 sightings after the Royal Air Force (RAF) shut down a 50-year-long investigation.

Among close encounters were objects "transparent like a jellyfish" and lights "looking like ( Read more... )

Charles Dickens: newly discovered documents reveal truth about his death and burial: the name of John Forster was fresh in my mind from the less than glorious role that he played in the sad saga of L.E.L. (and yet another case of reputation management...)
Passionate pioneers - increasing access to botanical artwork by women artists and putting ( Read more... )

I depose that the week in which it was revealed that Charles Dickens tried to get his (sane but inconvenient) wife committed to a lunatic asylum is not the week to hymn 'family life [as] the most successful form of social security the world has ever known'.
The guy is getting his head handed to him fairly comprehensively on Twitter, but really. The ( Read more... )

Honestly. It's a freezing cold night: if you want to chug me on my own doorstep about Your Good Cause, trying to engage in jolly conversational badinage while the wind whistles through the open front door is not the way to do it.
Not that I am madly keen on the doorstepping approach at the best of times.
Okay, I was actually really rather touched a ( Read more... )

Remind me what century we are in, again? An admissions tutor at Cambridge University claims private schools are teaching women how to sit demurely to improve their chances at an Oxbridge interview.
This is particularly weird if they are applying to study his subject, which is clinical veterinary anatomy. Which I assume leads to working in a field ( Read more... )

Dept of, reviewers clearly don't read:
- Review of The Road to Middlemarch: My Life with George Eliot in which reviewer describes Fred Vincy as a marginal character. That would be, a marginal character whose trajectory from feckless waiting for something to turn up to responsibility and marriage is a major strand within the novel.
- review of a ( Read more... )

Just saw an article (not sure if this link will work or not), claiming that Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to draw attention to the plight of the poor.

We feel, that if that was what he was aiming it, he hit something else entirely.

Because are not the poor in ACC there in order to be all about Scrooge's redemptive journey? (It's all about the ( Read more... )

At the side of the up escalator, ads for something promising 'Hot White Teeth in 2 weeks'.

To which my response was, are not hot teeth rather uncomfortable? or perhaps it is just a pleasing warmth.

Even so, perhaps not optimum for eating ice-cream with.

Which led me to think about that (though apparently it's a spoof?) Ben and Jerry literary-themed ( Read more... )

To a seminar this pm on an early C20th collector/collection of erotica, actually, sexually-themed items, a large number of which were distinctly less than arousing phallic amulets. It was all quite interesting (there were issues about classification, display and censorship that related to my work on printed sexological material of the era), but I ( Read more... )

Apparently Edwina Currie has been thoroughly noxious to some poor family in a radio phone-in programme by expressing her belief that they brought it upon themselves by living high on the hog.

I have cited this before: my feelings for Dickens are ambiguous in the extreme (have just set up the nomination post for a
( Read more... )