You know, I would be a bit more convinced by this (article about The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes), if the author were not described as holding a post which does not exist - people are not Professors of 'the University of London' but of one or other of the constituent colleges federated to it. This may be a reporter's error, I suppose. There had also ( Read more... )

I was actually rather irked by this piece on British lesbian fascists, because a) I think there's a huge lacuna there, which is not talking about the (probably relevant) class origins or aspiration of the women along that trajectory b) 'many suffragettes became fascists'? (plz to be giving cites) c) I can think of several well-known lesbians ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished The Black Book, a really solid and important work.
Though after that (and everything else) felt like something a bit lighter, so went for Margery Sharp, The Stone of Chastity (1940), which had been intriguing me for many years during which I had been unable to get hold of it. It's actually not, I think, among the top Sharps for ( Read more... )

Okay, okay, any of you who already saw this, probably said, I bet
( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Lesser Lives and continued to be rather irked by her assumptions that Victorian women were largely existing in a state of silent passive suppression, and expressing startlement when they turned out to be Madeleine Smith and bonking a young man of inferior social class and then (putatively) serving him arsenic-laced cocoa when ( Read more... )

I'm currently reading Sybil Oldfield's The Black Book: The Britons on the Nazi Hitlist (2020) and imagine my astonishment when I came across the name of George Orwell and it was not emboldened (all the names of individuals and organisations which appeared in the Book are emboldened in the text).
Yes, apparently George was not considered anything ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished the Newbolt biography and was a bit underwhelmed - felt that there was a lot of material she'd just plonked down in more or less chronological order and it didn't feel engaged with. It was particularly disappointing, given that Chitty outed Charles Kingsley's very weird erotic life in The Beast and the Monk, given the somewhat ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Jo Walton, Ha'penny and went on to Half a Crown (2008): the whole sequence as good as I remembered.
Which is not what I could say for the first in a series of thrillers about a woman PI in California in the 80s that I read back in the day and picked off the shelf to see how it had held up, and, readers, it had not, so gave up.
( Read more... )

(When I was looking for depictions of Clio, too often she looked like the ditzy grad student the male professor was hoping to seduce.)
I am devastated that, very likely, the Artemisia Gentileschi exhibition will be over before I venture forth from seclusion:
Artemisia Gentileschi: triumph of a trailblazer: Editorial
Forgotten by whom, Jonathan? ( ( Read more... )

What I read
The most recent Slightly Foxed.
Finished EM Delafield's General Impressions (1933) - several series of humorous articles from Time and Tide. Possibly funnier in their day. Also People You Love: On the Status of the Family Under Nazism, which is terrifying.
Lucy Neville, Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys: Women and Gay Male Pornography ( Read more... )