"To ensure their safe return, some monasteries put their volumes under anathemata, threatening unfaithful borrowers with excommunication." -- Andrew Pettigree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Library (London: Profile Books, 2021), p 40 Also posted at https://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/1104607.html.

Registering here the outpouring of memorializing I've mainly joined in with elsewhere. Terrance Dicks was a great storyteller, a wry colluder with the childhood imagination, a subtle improver of memories of lost television. He was also acutely aware of structure, genre and his and his work's place in time, and of his work as collaborative act, ( Read more... )

I've admired Maira Kalman's work when I have seen it, but haven't owned any of her books until this Christmas when I found this among my presents. Kalman's sensitivity towards her subjects was always evident and it's right that a volume should concentrate on her dogs, now needy, now loving, sometimes furious, often content. The original content ( Read more... )

The title is a little misleading, as part of Isabel Hardman's argument is that the popular perception (if she sets it up accurately) that the United Kingdom has the wrong politicians is mistaken, and that to some extent politicians are trapped in a system which too many people have vested interests in not changing. The bias towards people able and ( Read more... )

I have a book out, in Obverse's series of Doctor Who monographs The Black Archive. For more details and a link to download a sample, see the publisher's website.

Also posted at https://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/954031.html.

Some blatant fanzine plugging:

The latest issue of The Tides of Time, number 41, was published by The Oxford Doctor Who Society in June 2018. It's printed in colour throughout its 80 pages and is edited by James Ashworth, who is studying biology at Worcester College, and society veteran, its historian Matthew Kilburn ( Read more... )

Over at The Event Library, some thoughts by me on what Doctor Who readers were expecting from David Whitaker, why they were expecting it, and whether their wishes were realistic.

Also posted at https://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/922657.html.

My review from GoodreadsPhilip Pullman has returned to the world of Lyra, nearly two decades after completing the trilogy His Dark Materials - but the events narrated are set about ten years before those of the books which illuminated children's literature in the 1990s. This isn't a backward-looking story; more light and plenty of shade is cast ( Read more... )

"The vicissitudes of old books furnish a romantic chapter in the history of literature. About the end of the eighteenth century, the library of an old Lincolnshire house was overhauled by someone who weeded out a lot of what he no doubt considered rubbish. These were destroyed, except for a few which were begged by the gardener, who probably wanted ( Read more... )

"Mind Dickie teks things varry literal. He's watchin' Ted Heath mekkin a speech at the Convarsative Conference when it was on the telly. "We must, we must" sez Ted "Wage war against poverty". So Dick gans strite oot and shoots a tramp."
---Dick Irwin and Scott Dobson, Geordie Laffs (Newcastle: Frank Graham, ( Read more... )