I was so cheering for what Polly Toynbee was saying about the 70s: Are the 2020s really like living back in the 1970s? I wish …: Most 70s imagery is a deliberately manufactured caricature, with its garish wallpaper and avocado suites, an ignored time zone between the swinging 60s and glitzy greed-is-good, big bang, big hair 80s. It’s an image that ( Read more... )

This book sounds fascinating, even if I suspect one might also sometimes wish to have at the subjects (or at least Murdoch) with a codfish: Boo to the Boo-Hurrahs: how four Oxford women transformed philosophy. Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley took on the male consensus-and revolutionised modern ethics: The four ( Read more... )

On the one hand, obviously (???) there is something problematic about societal obligations upon women to go into seclusion when they're menstruating -
On the other hand, though that part of my life is long behind me, there were certainly times when I would have liked to withdraw from the pressures for a day or so and just chill out with a hot- ( Read more... )

I was lately bopping off an email to a complete stranger anent their post to a subject-related blog concerning a minor point of interest to we sifilis-nerds (it is a niche interest, I admit, even when we extend it to include ye clappe) -
- and I thought, maybe I ought to include 'she/her' in my signature, it seems to be the thing these days?
It ( Read more... )

Because the source for Norbert-Elias-The Civilising-Process-for-Dummies notion I have is not even Journal of Saw It Somewhere Studies, it is Proceedings of I Think I Heard This In A Conference Presentation Once.
Anyway, I was given to think about it by reading various of those infuriating accounts of people not observing requirements to wear masks ( Read more... )

I daresay to take something that crops up in one's idle browsing of Ye Internetz and Soshul Meedja as Ghastly Phenomenon of These Yere Modern Dayze is approximately like journos making a new lifestyle trend out of half-a-dozen people they recently spoken to in their favourite wine-bar (in those halcyon days when people did that thing...)
Very ( Read more... )

Happy 117th birthday, Barbara Hepworth - the video to go with today's celebratory Google Doodle.
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I was initially cynical about an interview with a sexual psychophysiologist and neuroscientist but it's wonderfully It's All More Complicated about simplistic views about sexuality, sexual arousal, ideas of the gendered brain and patterns of arousal ( Read more... )

But every so often I've seen tweets cropping up being very gung-ho about the outcome of the Black Death being the Decline of Feudalism and the Rise of Peasant Power...
Well, I am not A Medievalist and I do not work on economic/labour history but simply on the basis of my undergraduate curriculum back in days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and ( Read more... )

I have probably previously mentioned the moral shift from, it was okay for men to maintain An Establishment outside marriage, to moral opprobrium for men, even in the Highest Rank, who did this, because of changing expectations of marriage, relationships and, of course, availability of divorce so that couples did not have to rub on together whether ( Read more... )

But really, this new bio of Mrs Delany is either being badly misrepresented in this review, or just BAD: Mrs Delany: A Life by Clarissa Campbell Orr review - an 18th-century late bloomer. Mary Delany found fame for her flower ‘mosaiks’ in her 70s, but this followed decades of turbulence. I may not know that much about Mrs D, but I do know that she ( Read more... )