"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.

Jackie Lane has died aged seventy-nine. She played Dodo Chaplet, travelling companion to William Hartnell's Doctor in Doctor Who, between Bell of Doom, the fourth and final part of the story the scripts and Doctor Who Magazine call The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve but which BBC Studios call The Massacre (26 February 1966) and The War Machines ( 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.

This is not the last time that I will be promoting this book here, for transparent reasons. "Explore Gothic castles, ghosts in armour, amphibious landings and a heroine who already knows her own mind, as the gargoyles of the Gothic aesthetic merge with the bogeymen of Britain's imperial decline," says the author on Facebook about his contribution ( 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.

More musings on Doctor Who and national identity from me have been published at John Connors's Time Lines blog. I've written an introduction with more ideas at The Event Library, and the posts themselves are available at part two and part three.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/2016/09/13/dont-shoot-hes-british-parts-two-and- ( Read more... )

The first part of a series of musings on Doctor Who and British identity, at John Connors's Timelines blog, originally commissioned by John for the fanzine Plaything of Sutekh which he co-edited with Richard Farrell. A short introduction can be found at The Event Library, too.

Also posted at http://sir-guinglain.dreamwidth.org/849575.html.

On Tuesday night I was discussing broadcasting history with someone and mention was made of Asa Briggs. Within an hour his death was announced. A few hours later, I learned of Sylvia Anderson's death; and now, Cliff Michelmore, a broadcaster who was moving into a retirement phase in my childhood but who still loomed large. The sense of twentieth- ( Read more... )

"As the antients had their Capitoline and their Olympian Jupiter, so we had our virgin of Winchester and our virgin of Walsingham: and as there were temples to the Capitoline Jupiter in other places, as well as on the Capitoline hill, and one at Athens in particular; so we had places dedicated to the virgin of Winchester, in other places as well as ( Read more... )

"Time-serving reviewers, those sensitive registers of the day-to-day changes in current and temperature, no longer invite their readers to sneer at Mr. Leavis, and Cambridge seems to be becoming increasingly aware to whom it owes its international reputation for English studies. The Leavis case is fortunately the rare one of the obnoxious character ( Read more... )