Dept of, I keep feeling they're desperately avoiding the obvious analogy like the elephant in the room: I keep seeing reviews and articles about this young writer - which invoke the phrase the [X] writer for/of the Now Times - this invocation of Some Other Writer of the past is present in this review of her latest. I haven't read the books, but ( Read more... )

Dept of, no, you are living the anachronistic Boys Own Adventure Dream: Benedict Allen arrives dressed like an explorer: all in green, multi-pocketed jacket, sturdy trousers, a bag that could carry accessories in the Amazon. It is a somewhat anachronistic get-up for a meeting in central London, at the Savoy hotel, but very useful given that we want ( Read more... )

Dept of Yayfulness: a new book by Ronald Hutton, this time on witches: The Witch: A History of Fear from Ancient Times to the Present.
And, Dept of Cults and the fears generated within enclosed communities: An account of the writer’s own life and her father’s in the Exclusive Brethren, and the chaos and freedom that followed the decision to walk ( Read more... )

I am fairly hmmmm about this piece on empaths, and wonder if some of those consultant empaths are employing the cold-reading tricks attributed to psychics, but buried in it is actually an interrogation of how useful quivering responsiveness to emotion is and the suggestion that 'empathy alone is not a reliable way of coming to a moral decision', ( Read more... )

Dept of, Utopian Dreams:
I bet the inhabitants holiday in San Serriffe: Let’s move to Framplington, Suffolk.
Essex has a radical past as the cradle of British modernism.
Dept of, Unsung Heroes (and Heroines):
Indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world.
Dept of, Attempts at Recovery:
I am pretty sure I have seen earlier attempts ( Read more... )

Extreme sport in Tooting: Ultra-running is one of the fastest growing sports, usually taking place in remote, scenic landscapes. Not a running track in London. Will competitors reach nirvana? I'm trying to resist the Tooting jokes based on the preferability of running in circles.
Yet another, not exactly condemned to repeat it, but review of book ( Read more... )

Dept of, Blaming the Internet for A Phenomenon we have seen before: perchance I am being unduly cynical, but this An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts. It broke me strikes me as Yet Another of those Born-Again Bloke pieces - okay, it's perhaps more often that FATHERHOOD has given them a new ( Read more... )

O dear yes, this rang a bell: the personality trait they call “the need for drama”, or NFD. I'm not sure those agree/disagree sentences cited are necessarily diagnostic, but I have definitely known people (e.g. former friend 'Q') who had to have a lot of ongoing soap-opera in their lives.
I do think it's not necessarily a binary thing, though what ( Read more... )

Dept of, this makes historian and archivist cringe:
Marriages are Made in Bond Street by Penrose Halson review.
This person has apparently obtained ownership of, or at least access to, the archive of the Heather Jenner Marriage Bureau: 'the agency and its archive eventually ended up in the hands of Penrose Halson, the author of this book' - ( Read more... )

Dept of Women's Bodies, Women's Lives, and, what century are we in, again?
Bridget Christie: feminine products a luxury? Hardly. At least Jeremy Corbyn understands (I may have mentioned, I feel totes smug at quite a lot of those 'tell your MP' this or that emails that I get, because I am of the opinion that Jezza* already knows).
‘It was the ( Read more... )