I was slightly squeamed by a debate I was linked to and read while having my breakfast (and as it is now mid-evening, I may be misremembering or have got it wrong in the first place, and was probably skimming a bit) about academic feminists.

It seemed to me that there was an elision from feminists who happen to be academics and vice versa to those ( Read more... )

I was thinking as I walked from the Tube about the literary cliche of the intellectual woman who is hopeless at housekeeping and although she may manage to get food on the table, it's never very appetising food.

And this reminded me of something my former colleague Madame Sosostris (the one who told me I would regret getting out of the Slow Motion ( Read more... )

My first thought on reading about this young woman on University Challenge was to miffily wonder whether their statistics go back to 1971 (when *I* was the Grandest Tiger in the Jungle, and reported in almost the same terms of ' trounced all opposition on University Challenge almost single-handed' - I think the phrase might have been ' ( Read more... )

Lucy Mangan: Isn't reading, like, really, really great?:
This is intended as no slur upon [Hay] festival... It is one of those entities that, even if it's not really your thing, you are still happier for knowing it exists - like Wiltshire, perhaps, or Uncle Joe's mint balls. It is simply because books and reading are to me such a fiercely private ( Read more... )

Reading this review of the new joint bio of de Beauvoir and Sartre, I was struck once more at the way in which de Beauvoir's decision not to stay with Nelson Algren is treated as a test she failed, or at least a choice she gets marked down for.

The assumption seems to be she wimped out, failed to Follow Her Heart, and was too enmeshed in her ( ( Read more... )

This was very very good, and I recommend it (as I do all of Norma Clarke's work) even though Pilkington's life was actually rather depressing. She married v young and her husband sounds creepy and on the make in various ways and started chasing after other women and finally set Laetitia up so that he could break in on her in presumed adultery so ( Read more... )

Forthcoming exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery:
Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings
Brilliant Women explores the image and identity of the independent creative woman in eighteenth-century Britain by examining the impact of the original 'Bluestocking' Circle, a group of women writers, artists and thinkers who were celebrated for ( Read more... )

Kathryn Flett in the TV reviews in today's Observer remarks:
Finally, a word in the Dawkins shell-like for future TV appearances: intellectual arrogance is a terribly unattractive quality in a man, particularly one allegedly clever enough to know better.
WORD. Not just a man, either, if possibly somewhat rarer in the female of the species (though I ( Read more... )

Of course they'd rather sit back with Plato's Symposium or Frege's theorem, but intellectuals have some less elevated tastes, too - cable TV wrestling or rap, anyone? Philip Oltermann confers with some great brains about their guilty pleasures.

Note how they tend to say something that proves they are 'just folks' (or in spite of their Grayt Braynz ( Read more... )

Am in Amsterdam. Updating from internet machine in hotel which does not allow you to open a second browser, which is unfortunate as there were a number of features I wanted to link to in today's Guardian"(aha! think have discovered way round this):

Archbishop of Canterbury deplores teaching of creationism as science (Go Primate! Go Primate!)

( Read more... )