Obituary of Maureen Colquhoun, Crusading Labour politician who was the first openly gay MP: Among the many issues for which she campaigned were the abolition of women’s prisons, abortion on demand, creche facilities at political conferences and the decriminalisation of prostitution.
She was outed by the Daily Mail gossip columnist and refused to ( Read more... )

Icon of my youth and several decades of adulthood, Katharine Whitehorn has died aged 93, having had Alzheimers for some years (I think I read a piece a few years ago by her son about deciding to put her in full-time nursing care).
I devoured her columns as they came out in The Observer, and in later years have accumulated what I think is the ( Read more... )

Sad to see that Vonda N McIntyre has died, though it was not unanticipated - earlier news that she was seriously ill.
While I concede that Dreamsnake is indeed great, and one of the reasons why we should go back and reconsider the 70s, I also have a lot of time for the 'Starfarers' sequence, which, although it actually appeared late 80s-early 90s, ( Read more... )

You know, I'm not sure I've seen any of the parts he played mentioned in this obituary - and, okay, I do not now and never have watched a great deal of TV.
But burnt to the discs of memory are three parts I did see him in, all an utter contrast to one another, all three-dimensionally amazing.
A brilliantly memorable and creepy Henleigh Grandcourt ( Read more... )

Sweden is bringing rabbit showjumping to the London Pet Show (yeah, I'm doing the Bunny Boggle over here - 'hip-hop-hip, wiggle your nose, boggling the bunny is the way it goes' - a justly-forgotten B-side in the Bogglemen's oeuvre).
Oh dear, I'm not sure even being a postmodernist meta-fiction excuses exploiting Ms Evans for fun and profit: ( Read more... )

No really, after I do this thing tomorrow my dance card is practically blank. Okay, I have a work presentation but that is reprise of thing I did elsewhere, and another work-related thing but that is an 'in conversation' type of deal, and a day workshop (at least, I think there is - things have gone a bit quiet) at which I am just there to be an ( Read more... )

Dept of, yet another call-out to Joanna Russ and How to Suppress Women's Writing: it suited everyone to think of Thompson not as a journeyman writer but rather as a hedge-scribe, an empty vessel through which the rural England of the 1880s had channelled its dying song.

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Dept of, getting it Rong Way Round: This was a Rosetta Stone before the key ( Read more... )

Alas, Robert Barnard has died. While I have perhaps not liked his more recent works quite as much as some of the earlier ones, he was still a writer I looked out for.

I am, however, a little irked at the kneejerk categorisation of his work as 'firmly in the cosy school of crime writing'.

While quite a number of his mysteries are definitely in a ( Read more... )

Dept of did she actually say that: Expression employed by one of the trainers at the gym during the week: 'I've got a memory like a fish'. I've never heard that before and am not sure whether it's an idiom I just hadn't encountered, based on what I believe researchers have proved is a scurrilous myth about goldfish and their memories, or whether it ( Read more... )

Today in the Guardian obituaries, Han Suyin.

A writer whom I have not read for many years. I enjoyed, at the time, her three volumes of autobiography The Crippled Tree (1965), A Mortal Flower (1966) and Birdless Summer (1968), but haven't read them for years, in fact I'm not sure I still have copies because I lent at least one of them to a friend ( Read more... )