Women, motherhood, depression and suicide:
Margaret Drabble on depression and ways to deal, if not actually overcome it:
I have long been a believer in the therapeutic powers of nature, and had faith that a good, long walk outdoors would always do me good. It might not cure me, but it would do me good.

Joint review of several books on motherhood, ( Read more... )

Vikings ripped off by fake swords:
Some Viking swords were among the best ever made, still fearsome weapons after a millennium. The legendary swords found at Viking sites across northern Europe bear the maker's name, Ulfberht, in raised letters at the hilt end. Puzzlingly, so do the worst ones, found in fragments on battle sites or in graves ( Read more... )

Review of the book about Joan Easdale/Sophie, link to article about whom I posted yesterday.

Extract from Stephane Merritt's memoir of depression:
I had always assumed that having a breakdown meant that you shut down altogether, and that you would know you were having one if you lost your grip on reason.

Oh dear yes.
If I lost my job, I would be ( Read more... )

This is an extraordinary story: As a young woman, Celia Robertson's grandmother was a poet of enormous promise, feted by the Bloomsbury set and with a bright future ahead of her. By the end she was a paranoid old lady, living in precarious destitution. What on earth went wrong? (synchronicitously, I read a review of Robertson's book about her ( Read more... )

This story, A H Jacobs on a spiritual journey I began a year ago. My quest has been this: to live the ultimate biblical life. Or, more precisely, to follow the Bible as literally as possible reminded me an awful lot of that clueless bloke who decided to 'live as a woman' for a week, going solely, as far as one could see, on the basis of a rather ( Read more... )

Thanks to everybody who provided assistance in trying to discover the details of the story I was looking for - even if I still haven't managed to pin it down.

The context for me was writing up my commentator's notes from the January workshop in Cambridge as an afterword to the published papers. One of the subjects under discussion was the history ( Read more... )

Article based on a forthcoming book about the wedding industry. Interesting. I mean, I know all about the invention of 'tradition', but I shouldn't assume that eny fule no this. I also like that the writer is not just condemning the 'Bridezilla' (though not actually going into, here, about how demeaning a stereotype of women it is - maybe in the ( Read more... )

On the treadmill at the gym, listening to my iPod, one track that came up was The Stylistic's 'Rocking Roll Baby'.

On the one hand this is a rather sweet song in that it has a father doting about the utter cuteness of his little baby boychild (without descending to the kind of tonstant weader gets the ick effect produced by the columns of Neil ( Read more... )

Because it starts off all sorts of interesting trains of thought that won't really fit into the parameters of a 1000-word review.

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One is that thing, certainly not unique to Sheldon/Tiptree, of women asserting that they prefer the company of men to that of women. Which isn't, actually, about preferring the company of all XY people to all XX ( Read more... )

There are so many stories about girls who leave home to pursue disapproved or unconventional careers or courses of action, that it's really lovely to read a true-life story about a man who left his 'die-hard shipbuilding family' to become a nurse (at a time when male nurses were less common). Though I'm intrigued at the throwaway comment that by ( Read more... )