Okay, I will cop to never having really got on with the works of Angela Carter.
Partly, perhaps, because she got a load of literary cred while authors I much preferred who were also working in the gothic fantastical mode - Tanith Lee, Jane Gaskell - were just not on litcrit radar.
And as for this: At a time when English literature was dominated by ( Read more... )

That was a loooooong day of conference and post conference socialising. I was going to leave after the closing reception, but was seduced into joining a party going out to dinner.
Which was quite agreeable in many ways - not least, actually getting out and walking in the open air, to the restaurant, and then back to hotel - but there were various ( Read more... )

From my tablet while en famille, which between the little touch keyboard and the really annoying autocomplete (which nearly posted as 'incomplete') is somewhat maddening.
There were breakfast rolls yesterday (basic buttermilk 3:1 strong white and coarse cornmeal).
?No 3W4DW this year or have I missed some announcement? (Though given what I started ( Read more... )

Further to my rant last Friday, I had a phonecall this morning from somebody at the organisation in question -
Who had actually taken the trouble to walk through the steps I'd taken and found, lo and behold -
Even if you are logged in it tells you to log in at that section of the site and if you try to log in you go round in circles.
And the ( Read more... )

If somebody was born in 1881, and did not qualify in medicine until 1929 (and as the first woman was admitted to Bristol Medical School in 1891, I don't think she was the first woman medical graduate therefrom: also, would it have been an MD degree rather than the standard MS BS? enquiring minds, etc) she cannot by any stretch of the imagination be ( Read more... )

I have just been doing a certain amount of codslapping on Twitter caused by a confusion over the meaning of 'archives', which in this case meant 'digitised back issues of a journal'.
Which I might have sighed and let go, but that this received a response from an official library person referring them to the archives department to answer their ( Read more... )

Spotted a meme-y thing going around Facebook on the lines of 'only Britain doesn't have an Independence Day because they were what everyone else was seeking independence from'.
Ahem.
Okay, the UK's sins of imperialism were numerous and gross, but they were hardly the only power from which independence was being sought.
I suppose the situation is ( Read more... )

To an event on Matter of Historical Interest (not an academic conference but full of useful references and hints for further reading), held in a gallery in connection with an exhibition there.
The event itself was great apart from a few timing issues, but, honestly, if gallery in question is going to put on Events as well as having quite ( Read more... )

As I had to get out of the house this morning for a GP appointment, I thought I might as well taken advantage of the fact, and already being going in the same general direction, to go back to the British Library with the requisite documentation and renew my reader's pass.
Yay! Done!
I then went and ordered several volumes of the really obscure ( Read more... )

Today I was participating in one of those 'Wednesday fortnight always comes' commitments which I did not bother disseminating information about to my dr rdrz because, well, topic I find myself being asked to talk about that I wish I wasn't, but can't ever think of anyone else to name.
Anyway, involved being part of a rather mixed panel scheduled in ( Read more... )