Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

And I am really not sure that when GK Chesterton was going on about the people of England and whether they had or had not spoken yet, whether he included making direct debits to institutions one deemed worthy of support or pulling down statues or civil protest or, being on jury duty, acquitting people who did the latter, as the sort of speech acts ( Read more... )

Possibly fell into several Russ 'How to Suppress Women's Writing' categories.
Anyway, a woman doctor who works in palliative care in the NHS has written a memoir of her work in the early months of the pandemic -
And one might think that this is a valuable work of reportage by someone in the front line, achieved on top of their harrowing day job, ( Read more... )

I depose that the week in which it was revealed that Charles Dickens tried to get his (sane but inconvenient) wife committed to a lunatic asylum is not the week to hymn 'family life [as] the most successful form of social security the world has ever known'.
The guy is getting his head handed to him fairly comprehensively on Twitter, but really. The ( Read more... )

A busy day of seeing the sights (we are having a few days in Belgium).
(Wot is this minimalist thing with hotels that means there is never enough anywhere to put things? sigh)
First thing we went to look at some architecture near the station (turn of the century houses, v eclectic, from faux-Renaissance to Art Nouveau via various divagations): ( Read more... )

Or, chugged on my own doorstep by Greenpeace.
I would think good luck with finding many people in on this street at this time of day, in fact, I think they were quite falling over themselves at having found somebody in that they could give their spiel to.
While, you know, I have nothing against Greenpeace per se, I am not inclined to sign up to ( Read more... )

Went aaaargh at reading this: There was much more of a philanthropic bent in Victorian society and I think what might have happened to us is we had so many years of a well-functioning welfare state that personal and business philanthropy was no longer required.

a) the inefficiency and inadequacy of Victorian charity, not to mention the degradation ( Read more... )

What I read
Barbara Hambly, Darkness on his Bones (2015). Somehow I just do not, on the whole, find this series quite as riveting as some of her others, but still, pretty good.
Heather Rose Jones, Daughter of Mystery (2014): found this a bit slow to get going, but good enough that I've now downloaded the followup, The Mystical Marriage
Jo Walton, ( Read more... )

Having my attention drawn (via
( Read more... )

I didn't realise it was a mystery, but this sad story of Constance Wilde, retrospective diagnosis, and medical malpractice looks like a classic case of 'anything wrong with a woman must be down to something in her reproductive organs'.
Crowdfunding saved Timbuktu’s manuscripts: [T]he woman behind T160K is relaunching it with a bigger team and ( Read more... )