Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

What I read
Well, I did actually get to the end of Diana of the Crossways (there may have been a certain amount of skimming, OMG, George M, you were neither George Eliot nor Oscar Wilde, your deep thinkies were not all that and spare me your notion of glitteringly witty dialogue). Came away thinking he thought in a rather Henry Jamesian way that ( Read more... )

This defence: They also said it was not possible to hold John responsible for Blauel’s mental health since she had struggled well before the release of the Rocketman film and his autobiography.

Context: lawsuit over: 'deep psychological distress [caused] by repeatedly breaching a 1988 divorce agreement to not discuss their marriage.... Blauel... ( Read more... )

There's a strong interview with Christopher Eccleston in today's Guardian G2 on his issues with bodily dysphoria, mental health problems, etc “I’m male and northern and from a working-class background, so you were not supposed to speak about your feelings,” he says. “I still carry all the baggage about masculinity and toughness, and I was ashamed ( Read more... )

I suppose it is possibly a good thing that there is a popular-type biography of Anne Lister just out: Gentleman Jack: A biography of Anne Lister, Regency Landowner, Seducer and Secret Diarist by Angela Steidele and Katy Derbyshire, though the word 'secret' there makes me cringe. Keeping a diary was, after all, in most cases a private practice (and ( Read more... )

What I read
Finally made it to the end, with a considerable amount of skimming and skipping, of Zone of the Interior: there was something very off-putting about the narrative stance, which I think was trying to demonstrate sardonic detachment from the antipsychiatric cultists he was mixed up with (and really, everybody else in sight) to an extent ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Into the Fire.
For some reason, there tends to be a confluence between Slightly Foxed and Literary Review every three months (but I think The Scribbler may have been previous week and I forgot to log it). I suppose, re The Scribbler, that if you are featuring stories about learning to play the Old Joanna, and your wheelhouse is ( Read more... )

On FB somebody on my list posted one of those not necessarily entirely spurious but often dodgily described and attributed historical documents, this one of 'Causes of Admission to Lunatic Asylums' mid-C19th. (Not as clearly dodgy as what was given out as the alleged menu of a 1912 London brothel, with the prices given in $$.)
I'm not saying that ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished the Upward book - not really a biography, more about thinking about him as a literary man, even though one might say that much of his life was one of 'unhistoric acts' as a teacher, Communist, non-Communist far left person, CND activist, etc; which might be more interesting to me, at least, than the endless angsting about ( Read more... )

What I read
The only thing I finished in the past week was Jo Walton, Necessity (2016), which perhaps I didn't enjoy quite as much as the preceding two volumes - though at some time I must reread the entire trilogy.
On the go
Still making my way through the Merrill Theory of Lit'ry Criticism, which is very good, though, by the nature of thing - ( Read more... )