I'm not sure if this is actually true - some of the things going around have a touch of the urban legendary about them - but people policing other people's shopping baskets for 'non-essential' items?
I don't think this is so much going back to muttering about 'having dealings with spivs for black market goods' as 'entering into somewhat dodgy ( Read more... )

Two dos, both in the same Bloomsberries-associated venue on Monday and Friday this week (though oddly enough, the invites gave different addresses - but several of the houses on that side of the square are all connected, and in the event, entrance was through the same main one, both times, with some matter of emergency handwritten notices.
(I ( Read more... )

What I read
Last episode of Tremontaine Season 4: pretty good overall.
Melissa Smith, Finders (2018), not, for me, among her top books, a bit too much futtock-shroudery about the mechanics of how things worked, which is just not my thing, somehow.
Noel Streatfeild, Grass in Piccadilly (1952), set just after the War as people are returning to ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished the Upward book - not really a biography, more about thinking about him as a literary man, even though one might say that much of his life was one of 'unhistoric acts' as a teacher, Communist, non-Communist far left person, CND activist, etc; which might be more interesting to me, at least, than the endless angsting about ( Read more... )

Okay, I knew that I would probably not get the documents I sent an email preordering on my arrival, because I didn't manage to carve out enough time to sit down and do that thing until last Saturday: but I really did not anticipate that I would arrive to a situation where some malfunction meant they couldn't open the strongroom door and spent most ( Read more... )

Further re the people who want to Speak to Somebody rather than emailing, and that young person yesterday who was spamming people via PM about their vampire-novel-in-progress, and remark in locked post on my rlist about someone who goes around connecting to people in a scholarly field rather sitting down and reading the literature...

Maybe it is ( Read more... )

At least, I wonder if having read Doctor Faustus at an impressionable age lies behind the wild claims of a recent biographer that Benjamin Britten died of the syph.

Which it is contended he got from Peter Pears.

We should like to see some evidence that Pears actually had Ye Greate Poxxe, apart from speculative hypothesis that Britten died of ( Read more... )

Finally (at some expense) managed to get hold of a Region-2 compatible DVD of The Women (1939).

And discovered that while several of the women are nasty in assorted ways, everyone is not out to annexe somebody else's husband or put malicious gossip in circulation and there's even a fair degree of inter-female loyalty and supportiveness.

Okay, one ( Read more... )

Could not locate my copy of Thinking about Women (1968) this morning, so have been unable to determine whether Ellmann includes 'bitch/bitching' along with 'shrill' etc in her analysis of female-unfriendly gendered language. Can't remember if she does.

It's not as though men don't bitch, any more than they don't gossip (I once sat in front of 2 ( Read more... )

There has been some discussion, hither and yon, about perceptions that Certain People within X Field are a Cabal and you offend them at your peril.

Which gave me to reflect that for all I know there are people out there within my general academic fields of interest who are muttering about the Powerful Dr Oursin and Her Cabal of Dooooooom...

Which ( Read more... )