the Milly-Molly-Mandy-to-Mrs Miniver pipeline

I'm curating a show about the Two Roberts for Charleston in Lewes. Currently unwrapping artworks being loaned to us by incredibly generous individuals and institutions - it's like Christmas! 'Artists, Lovers, Outsiders' opens Oct 15: www.charleston.org.uk/exhibition/r...

Just arrived from the printers. The Book of Bogs began as a community response & has grown beyond the Walshaw Moor into a wider celebration & campaign for bogs & other peatland ecologies. This was the most brilliant crowdfunded project, with over 40 contributions from artists & poets. OUT NOW.

the booker prize judges make a lot of fuss about having to read 153 books. but assuming an average weight of 750g per book, that comes in at 115kg of literature - or just under the weight of a single adult male ostrich

It's MRS MINIVER by Jan Struther, which was first published in the UK in 1940 and began life as a light-hearted newspaper column in the Times. It took on a a very different form as a Hollywood movie starring Greer Garson in 1942.

There are echoes of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in that this novel is set in London and starts with the central character exuberantly buying herself some flowers. Although in this case it’s "a big sheaf of chrysanthemums… the big mop-headed kind, burgundy-coloured, with curled petals"

For the first time ever, a student nearly got my literature quiz question right. None of my colleagues ever got so close. Without looking it up, which classic of American literature mentions cricket, and which classic of English literature mentions baseball?

Apparently some authors look forward to their royalty statements, rather than it being crushing confirmation of professional failure

The world feels heavy. I am wading back to myself after a month of nursery and reception settling. BUT, there are archival visits on the horizon. There are still little stories to be told. Please tell me: what things are you looking forward to this autumn?

If you write professionally in the UK, make sure to sign up to ALCS for your fair share of royalties

‘Rachel Ruysch was interested in the difference between interiors and exteriors. She painted cut stems in which you can see the pith running up the centre in cross-section, as well as broken eggs, burst grapes, halved pomegranates.’ Clare Bucknell on the Dutch painter: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Since I made fun of Shelley yesterday, here is a good bit, from “To ——.”

A Personal Anthology is a weekly mailout in which a guest editor (writer, reader, critic, mongoose) picks and introduces a dozen favourite short stories. So if you love short stories and would like to take part, let me know! (DMs open.) In fact, I have an empty slot NEXT WEEK. Carpe Diem!

My new book - #Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth & Power - in good company in the window of @hatchards.bsky.social bookshop, London, with @profaliceroberts.bsky.social, James Fox and Harry Sidebottom.

Such an incredible exhibition - Do Ho Suh, South Korean artist, at Tate Modern. Explores the psychology of home in wildly experimental, beautiful ways. Go!

'For the hospital, and for the NHS, it was a closed case, another preventable death: medicine is imperfect, such things happen. I couldn’t accept that.' @paullaity.bsky.social After Martha

I heard "unfortunately you can't not do this thing in fiction" & have been determinedly not doing it since

I’ve been miserable since finishing my novel. It’s very simple really: I prefer the worlds I create to the one I live in. This must be a common thing with writers.

'It must have appeared to the young Virginia Stephen as if they were worlds apart; while she was stuck at home with her father and her tedious domestic duties, ‘Miss Harrison’ was a brilliant Cambridge scholar who was already famous for her lectures.' Interesting essay by @akennedysmith.bsky.social.

Who's afraid of Jane Harrison? I wrote about the Cambridge classicist who inspired Virginia Woolf.

This is as good a time as any to say that I remain pissed off that Robert Redford wasn't nominated for ALL IS LOST (2013). What the hell, Oscar voters.

"It don't need to be perfect." New Springsteen biopic trailer just dropped. Still looks garbage. youtu.be/OuRX3n2LTlc?...

Thank you for sharing this gorgeous photo and providing such a lovely article on Lucy M. Boston. The Green Knowe books were a much-treasured staple for many of us growing up and we are so happy to share your piece with our readers.

Autumn's around the corner, and among the fallen leaves here's the new Slightly Foxed magazine with my piece on Lucy M. Boston's charming memoir, Memory in a House (1973) @slightlyfoxed.bsky.social

“I like to live spaciously, but rather plainly, in large halls with great spaces and quiet libraries. I like to wake in the morning with the sense of a great, silent garden round me....” – Jane Harrison

Virginia Woolf famously wrote about being locked out of Trinity College Cambridge's Wren Library in A Room of One's Own in 1929 (“ladies are only admitted to the library if accompanied by a Fellow of the College”). I wrote about a few I managed to get into. akennedysmith.substack.com/p/libraries-...

Back at my desk today after a summer break & catching up with reading. And what a joyful & inspiring post to get me back into the swing of things: 'Libraries to fall in love with' by @akennedysmith.bsky.social. open.substack.com/pub/akennedy...

I loved Sorry, Baby — one of those films you know you’ll be thinking about for a while. www.irishtimes.com/culture/film...

Wonderful piece about (by Wendy Jones) and by the great Martin Parr concerning his autobiography‘Utterly lazy and inattentive’. Ill be in conversation with him at the Oxford Literary Festival next March …. www.theguardian.com/artanddesign...

I've been working on anonymised transcripts of interviews with retired 1980s steelworkers & as a mnemonic device I gave them names/tags: eg Fingerless Bill, Lovespoon Larry, Am-Dram Dan, Trombonist Tom, Hip-Op Harry. Am now writing something scholarly & it's a wrench going back to dull file numbers.

I wrote about one of the most urgent questions in literary criticism someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/who-are-th...

'The book is “a record of the beginning and development of two voices” – one coming to us via fiction, the other via nonfiction.' My review of I Want to Talk to You by Diana Evans in this week's TLS (the last one in its weekly format).

The dark side of the Durrells; Oscar Wilde’s conversion; making and describing great wine; Europe’s last pagans; good teachers; second mentions – and much more. The new issue of the TLS is out now: www.the-tls.com/issues/curr...

'A beautifully written story that draws together food, friendship, illness and separation, yet – despite everything – shimmers with hope and possibility' @akennedysmith.bsky.social reviews Diana Evans's short story Broth in the TLS: www.the-tls.com/literature/e...

A couple of images from my Jackdaw series.💙 This is the piece I wrote to accompany the series deborahparkinphotography.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-...

"People often commented on how direct she was. She went straight to the heart of the problem. There are funny stories about this with respect to her disagreements with other philosophers of the period, like Merleau-Ponty." fivebooks.com/best-books/s...

‘A friend was reading to me one day from 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘴 and I misheard a line as “the senses have wind.” They did, they do.’ @tricialockwood.bsky.social: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I feel spoon- or more general cutlery-anxiety goes back a long way. ?Longstanding English class issues trope? (has anyone studied this?) Remember columns in women's mags of 50s/60s about how to cope at fancy dinners. Katharine Whitehorn took this advice on (ending up eating dessert with salad fork).

'Bell has too often been overshadowed by her contemporaries, or pigeonholed by her domestically scaled work. No longer.' Katy Hessel on the first solo Vanessa Bell exhibition.

Book cover designs by the painter, illustrator and designer Vanessa Bell (1879-1961), a hugely talented artist in her own right (no need to be defined as sister of).

Peter Ackroyd's new biography of W.H. Auden will be published next March by @reaktionbooks.bsky.social.

Wonderful writer — also, what a great cover —

Wild marjoram, Hobson’s Conduit, Cambridge. #WildflowerHour

I've recently been getting into reading Sayers.

The final instalment in my series about crime writer Dorothy L. Sayers and how in 1937 a Cambridge scholar called Q.D. Leavis tried to cut her down to size in her withering review, 'The Case of Miss Dorothy Sayers'.

New episode up now. A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney, with guests Dave Haslam and Melanie Williams in conversation with Andy Miller, Una McCormack and Nicky Birch. @davehaslam.bsky.social @britfilmmelanie.bsky.social @unamccormack.bsky.social www.backlisted.fm/episodes/245...

Books read in July. (Also The Soul of Kindness on Kindle) #ElizabethTaylorNovels #BookSky

The name contains the ghost of a music hall song that was over half a century old in 1958. This is the sort of knowledge that eludes AI, because it knows songs in the way that a mynah bird knows them. This is why we need expert broadcasters and critics. I'm not confident that all media bosses agree.

Harold Harvey's career spanned the two generations of the Newlyn School in Cornwall, the first was represented by Norman Garstin, Walter Langley and Stanhope Forbes and the second represented by Laura and Harold Knight who arrived in Newlyn in 1907.  This is from 1939/40.