- I have been reading Victorian instruction manuals for household servants. The one for nursemaids has surprisingly sound advice on teaching kids good table manners, and also advice about feeding infants that makes me amazed that infant mortality wasn't higher. The one on being a good lady's maid is full of gems like 'it is a blessing to the heart ( Read more... )

Okay, False Value, notes as I went along. This is not an intelligent review of the book, this is more a look inside my head as I was reading it :-P

( spoilers here )

First off, Yuletide. I was assigned to valmora, who wanted Molly and Nightingale, and their prompts made me think about this exchange in RoL:

"Molly can do haemomancy," said Nightingale. "It's very impressive ( Read more... )

( aka stuff I've read or watched semi-recently )

I seem to be reading almost all non-fiction lately, though I am going to read the next couple of Penric & Desdemona novellas at some point soon. There's just so many fascinating non-fiction books out there. I tend to swing back and forth between history and biology/earth-related sciences as the two subjects I'll always pick up a book about, and ( Read more... )

If you haven't watched Happy Valley yet, do yourself a favour and go watch it now. It is amazing. I adored the first season, but the second season tops it. Utterly gripping, utterly brilliant, intelligent, funny, grounded, fantastic. I've never seen anything better on living your life when it's a fucked-up mess and you've still got to do the right ( Read more... )

Reviews of various things I've watched and read lately.

( it's either WW2 or food, mostly )

I've already talked about Nice Town, but we've come across an assortment of other TV stuff lately.

FarscapeThe first half-dozen or so episodes. I really liked it, awful rubber aliens and all. Aeryn Sun is wonderful if you like ruthless killing machines with a glimmering of a conscience, and the other two whose names I haven't yet managed to pick ( Read more... )

Due to a continued fascination with Paul McGann's beautiful face and voice, I ended up watching 'Nice Town', the deeply obscure 1992 mini-series that stars him (available streaming online here (1, 2, 3) and otherwise almost impossible to get hold of ( Read more... )

I seem to have been all about police and murder mystery stories lately, so now I have some reviews for you.

BabylonThe new police drama, not to be confused with Babylon 5, the epic SF drama. This has just started and I've just watched the first episode. Very modern-British, in the sense that it started with comic full-frontal male nudity and the ( Read more... )