History and the state: supporting institutional memory or challenging national myths?. Several historians' essays addressing this issue of particular present relevance.
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And on something that is not perhaps quite perpetuating national myth, but is still, perhaps, trying to fudge a dreadful record: ‘A Dark, Difficult, and Shameful Chapter’: Dr ( Read more... )

Mary Hockmore’s Lawyer: Marriage Breakdown and Women’s Rights in Seventeenth-Century England: For centuries the English common law rules concerning married women’s rights-known by the shorthand ‘coverture’-restricted a wife’s ability to control real estate, own movable property, enter into contracts or participate in litigation without the ( Read more... )

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I was a bit irked - apart from my previously stated historical-accuracy nitpicks - by the representation of women in The Limehouse Golem - no positive ties between any of the women characters, apparently either bitches or victims (even if the denouement complicated that), and the idea that Gay Men Were Their (unsuccessful and even deluded) Saviours ( Read more... )

How often is that one's response to the problems advanced to PSC or Private Lives in Guardian G2 of a Monday, sigh.
My boyfriend of three years has.... admitted he doesn't find vaginas particularly attractive, joking that mine is especially repulsive.... He jokes that bodily fluids are disgusting and always washes after sex. I feel self-conscious ( Read more... )

Isn't the fact that George Sand was a woman who dressed as a man fairly well-known (at least among educated and informed people, even if they have never opened one of her novels)?

Have just read a review in the THE by an academic who regarded this intelligence as a startling new fact.

Iz boggled.

Yesterday evening I was reading in Paul Bailey's Three Queer Lives the section on Fred Barnes, an early C20th music hall performer, who (according to his own memoirs as cited by Bailey) first began to dream of show business as a career when he saw Vesta Tilley playing a principal boy role in pantomime. (Tilley was noted as a male impersonator, and ( Read more... )