Got off my commentated version of an ms within my sphere of interest that I had been reading. Also got off a couple of emails in connection with outstanding projects, and revised an abstract and uploaded it to the relevant site.
Bought myself a new laptop! I have been less than satisfied with the Yogabook for some while, and have been havering and ( Read more... )

Article in the Guardian 'The Guide' section, which is not online (at least as yet) - it's in the series 'Solved! your crucial cultural questions answered', on the question 'Do uncertain times always result in great art?'

(Historian, remembering an undergraduate lecture during which lecturer on ye medeevles remarked that 'all ages were ages of ( Read more... )

What I read
KJ Charles, Any Old Diamonds (2019), which, breathtakingly twisty plot, but I was taken aback, because I do not expect this from KJC, by 2 bloopers: one of the characters has a title which was that of an actual and eminent Victorian aristo, and error over the terms of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act under which a woman might obtain a ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Pansies - I did not feel the elements of regional demotic were as jarring as they were in Glitterland, possibly because they were not being mediated by the consciousness of the first-person narrator of that? Quite sweet. Also, being, it appears, on somewhat of an Alexis Hall kick - I am not sure it is altogether desirable to ( Read more... )

Somebody writing on a topic who doesn't claim to have discovered a hitherto neglected subject: In pursuing the Ladies in Llangollen, I was not discovering them, though no one I mentioned them to had heard of them. I was picking up a trail first laid down by their intrigued contemporaries two centuries earlier.
I don't think the Ladies were ever ( Read more... )

It's that thing where one dispraises or insults a thing, but, on reflection, is that really what's being said?
E.g. I rather like Jay Rayner's line 'I refuse to denigrate the honest pleasures of self-abuse purely to make a point' because, indeed, is this not a harmless private pleasure?
I also have my doubts about 'were they raised by wolves?' to ( Read more... )

I liked this in a piece in today's Guardian Saturday Review: Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace presented their paper on the theory of evolution to the Linnean Society in 1858, but in the society’s annual summing-up, it announced that nothing very interesting had happened that year.
Which is pretty much up there with Louis XVI writing in his diary on ( Read more... )

The London Review of Books Bookshop Blog: The [Hypothetical] Booker Prize Winners, 1900-1968.
And I think, firstly, that if you are judging by present-day Booker criteria, how often, if ever, have you seen books that are funny, or genre, making the cut even on to the short list? I yield to none in my admiration for works such as The Pursuit of Love ( Read more... )

I vaguely recollect, some while ago, some discussion about modern (ish) novels that were set in (actual, rather than as serial-numbers-filed-off equivalent) Ruritania.
And I think I mentioned John Haythorne's The Strelsau Dimension (1981), about which I remember little but the name.
But this evening we were bagging up some of the books that had ( Read more... )

I slightly wonder if this idea that some cultures/languages do not differentiate fiction from non-fiction is a bit problematic -
- this may be down to Actually I Think This May Have Been A Question Or Comment On A Lecture I Heard Many Many Years Ago, concerning languages which do not have past and future tenses, or do something odd about time, and ( Read more... )