Elizabeth Bowen, cited in a post by
( Read more... )

I've been looking at that National Trust list of '50 things to do before you're 11 3/4'.

Okay, I can see it is a way to get Teh Young interested in the National Trust and its work and that it is getting them into the Great Outdoors and experiencing Naychur and so on...

But I am getting such an Enid Blyton/Just William vibe off it, which may be just ( Read more... )

Dept of pedantic nitpickery: surely, when talking about Darwin's relationship to a whole range of contemporary correspondents feeding him info, you should refer to them as 'other amateur' scientists, rather than as 'amateur scientists'. Somewhere in the text it does point out that by the early C20th
[S]cience itself became professionalised within ( Read more... )

The other evening someone asked me why I liked reading sff, and after doing my celebrated goldfish impression for several moments, I burbled a bit, but I don't think I answered the question, because I'm not sure there is an answer.

Things I burbled (with some later expansions):

That's a bit like asking me why I like reading.

My childhood reading ( Read more... )

When the Bauhaus art school opened in 1919, more women applied than men - so why have we never heard of them?. Reasonable point that women were being shunted into less prestigious fields of production like weaving and ceramics, but don't we also suspect that a lot of them ended up being a combination of muse and all-round support system to the male ( Read more... )

The five children's laureates were asked to pick their favourite children's book and plumped almost overwhelmingly for older books, with only five of the 35 titles selected less than 20 years old.

[T]hese are people thoroughly steeped in what children respond to, as opposed to what they ought to respond to, and have remained sensitive to what they ( Read more... )

( MI LIFE IN BUKZ, SORT-OF )

I've already posted to trennels apropos of Lucy Mangan's piece on Antonia Forest as part of her continuing series in the Guardian Family section on children's books.

On another childhood favourite, Hilary Mantel is scathing about what she perceives as the deleterious effects of What Katy Did, though I do rather wonder how foundational the notion of ( Read more... )

My Attention Has Been Drawn to this: Project X: Turns boys into real readers.

Is there not something very weird about naming something that is
Truly boy-friendly in its content, design, structure, and teaching and learning approach - turns boys into readers and writerProject X, when there seems to be this assumption that it is the Y chromosome ( Read more... )

Kathryn Hughes reviews The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the 14th Century by Ian Mortimer:
Mortimer knows what he is doing. He has previously written three very well received biographies of medieval kings which are both readable and erudite (much rarer in popular writing about the middle ages than you might ( Read more... )