A rather curious letter in The Guardian today about the recent adaptation of Black Narcissus: Black Narcissus and the white British lens:'Somehow we still ended up being told a story entirely from the perspective of the white European characters'.
However, I'm not sure, if you're adapting an original text, you could make the pretty drastic changes ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Ellis, Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831-1918, and makes a case that really, up until the Great War, when the military applications of SCIENCE proved their manly credentials, there was a constant murmur of dubiousness about the proper masculinity of nerdy scientist bods - lurking solitary and speculative, and even if ( Read more... )

(Actually, for reasons given, I don't think this quite reaches an apogee of the Hardyesque, but still).
Came across this, cited as a supporting example in a discussion of the early C20th literary culture of making awards and giving dinners to literary figures.
The Royal Society of Literature awarded Thomas Hardy its Gold Medal on the occasion of ( Read more... )

Come across, via idly surfing just now, somebody reporting another person expressing bogglement that they were Nepali-Nigerian, and because those places were so geographically distant, before this present time with modern travel and so on, could not have happened, wow, how weird.
Hmmm.
Okay, Nepal was not actually part of the British Empire, but ( Read more... )

This weekend is Diwali, and I find that there is an amazing installation at the Tate Britain: Chila Kumari Singh Burman transforms the front of Tate Britain into a celebration of neon light and swirling colour: Inspired by the artist’s childhood visits to the Blackpool illuminations and her family’s ice-cream van, Burman covers the façade of Tate ( Read more... )

No, seriously, statues do not just gently rise out of the ground to commemorate individuals, they are the produce of choices and decisions and negotiations and political agendas.

Like any feature of the built environment, they may come to feel like natural features of the landscape and the way it's always been, but a) they are not and b) it's ( Read more... )

I believe the usual woezers about the encroachments of plitikle krektness and the dreadful impact of 'snowflakes' on their right to 'free speech' - which they are, we note, woezing about in the columns of the press and quite often on the broadcast meedja as well -

- are waxing very agitato about the de-plinthing and sending swimming in the ( Read more... )

Passed across my radar this week the information that there is a recently published biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, first ever Indian MP in the British Parliament and founder of the Indian National Congress. (Harvard UP's site apprears to be a bit weird at the moment and returning error messages quite generally?)
Elected in 1892, for the London ( Read more... )

Women Photographers in the Historic England Archive: Discover the women photographers whose work enriches the collections of the Historic England Archive.
A one-way passage from India: Hackney Museum explores fate of colonial ayahs: Indian women were often employed to care for British children, but some were abandoned on reaching UK.
Interview with ( Read more... )

There is a movie out this week (caught the trailer a couple of weeks ago and was pretty sure it was Not My Thing), The Viceroy's House, about the Partition of India.
And really, after reading this article about how problematic it is (not that I didn't already have significant doubts), one is tempted to murmur that the Viceroy's house will never be ( Read more... )