This, I think, does count as actual rediscovery of a neglected, if not entirely forgotten, author of the 60s/70s: Lost Beneath the Waves of Time: Jane Gaskell in/and the ’60s (and reading that I realise that she was a lacuna in those studies of Angry Young/Rebel Women Writers of the same period, but probably she was just too Out There and In Genre ( Read more... )

The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?
Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.
You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived ( Read more... )

The wholly dubious claim to have 'discovered' something.
There is a review in today's Guardian Saturday Review of a novel. The author, according to the reviewer 'A TV reporter by trade... has uncovered the little-known tale of the Panacea Society'.
Some years ago - a bit longer ago than I thought, honestly - I posted the following:
Mention of a ( Read more... )

The Lost City That’s Not Lost, Not a City, and Doesn’t Need to Be Discovered.
Though - and this may be due to where one does one's archaeology and such-like factors - if you're going to talk about the idee fixe of 'discovering' something, isn't the classic account Schliemann digging down like a terrier after a badger until he came to what he ( Read more... )

I was synchronicitously pleased to find this blog post crossing my line of sight earlier today: Prospecting for kryptonite: the value of null results, because I had been thinking about incrementality and the time it takes for things to see results, and this is not just about scientific research.
Lately, at a symposium-thing I was speaking at, in ( Read more... )

Another review of the Women and Surrealism exhibition: What happens when a muse is left to her own devices, when an object becomes a subject, when a woman is free to be herself?

The boundary between The Observer Magazine and Observer Woman becomes yet more permeable: this was in the former, am surprised it wasn't in the latter, and am generally, ( Read more... )

Further to early comment about searching vs browsing.

Obviously, sometimes searching is the only way to go, when after something very clear and very specific. It may very well, for example, find you a particular book. What it won't supply is the serendipitous discovery. It may also be too focussed and fail to give due weight to context (I think of ( Read more... )

Sarah Waters on researching and writing her new novel set in World War II London (not clear to me whether she's actually looked at the copious vox pop material in the Mass Observation Archive) (and was a very minor figure in the research myself, largely consisting of giving her names of people who knew about the subject).

Recently rediscovered ( Read more... )

An interesting, though at points also maddening, article by Ben Goldacre, who has been doing the 'Bad Science' columns in the Guardian for quite some while, 'Don't dumb me down: We laughed, we cried, we learned about statistics ... why writing Bad Science has increased his suspicion of the media by, ooh, a lot of per cents'. I agree with his main ( Read more... )

Some very stimulating articles in today's Guardian:

Critique of assumptions about masculinity and fatherhood:
Dave Hill on the myths about testosterone: includes the following
Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Birkbeck College, sees the buoyant profile that testosterone today holds as being of a piece with a "quasi-religious" ( Read more... )