Valentine hearts.

DJ Taylor's 2018 radio doc 'The Advance Guard of the Avant-Garde' on experimental 1960s British writers: BS Johnson, Ann Quin, Eva Figes, Brigid Brophy, Rosemary Tonks, Prynne & C Brooke-Rose. Views from Jen Hodgson, Jonathan Coe, Eimear McBride & Jeremy Noel-Tod. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

Oh- how *wonderful* is this? Thank you @nguthrie.bsky.social

Just finished my first Brigid Brophy book 'Hackenfeller's Ape' ... 73 years after it was published. Better late than never! Excited to explore more by this author. Here's my review: bit.ly/49Qo7Kl #Booksky 💙📚 #Books 📚 #Literaturesky

Come and join the fabulous panel discussing Iris's poetry at The London Library in March! www.londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on/342...

An unusual two-Brophy post! Brigid Brophy and John Brophy. Thank you @casmilus.bsky.social

Traffic not too bad locally this morning.

Been reading mid-20th century humanist campaigners for prison reform and just come across a description by Brigid Brophy saying in imprisoning people we are ‘burying them alive’. What a powerful image, even more true of conditions today! If you don’t already, do support @thehowardleague.bsky.social

Let Brigid Brophy tickle your brain and bend your mind. Read In Transit.

Just a reminder that the deadline for the first round of applications for our (frankly excellent) MA Writing programme at the @royalcollegeofart.bsky.social closes next Monday, 19 January, so if you're thinking of applying please do so soon!

This is a marvellous Highsmith!

Enjoying *some* of these.

Nothing but these blooming in the garden at present:

Now we're in 2026, it's *ONLY three years* until the centenary of Brigid Brophy's birth, so here's to 2029! Photo of Brigid Brophy (and Antinous) by J. Lewinski.

Featuring, right, an early Brigid Brophy non-fiction volume, Black Ship to Hell, 1962. An interesting read, imo.

@edisky.bsky.social Thank you for reposting! Best wishes, K.

Brigid Brophy, The Finishing Touch (1963) David Lodge, Changing Places (1975) George V. Higgins, Kennedy for the Defense (1980) George R.R. Martin, Fevre Dream (1982) Jay B. Laws, The Unfinished (1992) Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason (1993)

Since I just started a chonky book that I won't finish before 2026, my 12 favorite reads of 2025 (in publication order): Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lolly Willowes (1926) Nathanael West, A Cool Million (1934) Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time (1951) Tewfik Al-Hakim, The Tree Climber (1962)

Just your annual reminder that this photo accurately reflects what Brigid Brophy thought of Christmas.

A regal wave to my followers from a sleigh as it was the nearest I could get to a throne!

Himself taste-testing tinsel. Not a good idea.

If you haven't read Brigid Brophy, then do investigate! I doubt she'd thank me, but I think of her as nestling provocatively between Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch, with the sly, sometimes savage irony of the former, and the latter's bustling care for her characters. The Snow Ball is my favourite.

Brigid Brophy admired George Bernard Shaw, as one can see in Hackenfeller's Ape, first published in 1953.

Brigid Brophy wrote 7 novels and these are the most recent editions:

[5] Brilliant! I'll say it again. The story is based on Brophy's knowledge of Anthony Blunt, gained via her husband Michael Levey, art historian, who knew him. Published before the revelations about the spying. Happy to find @brophylevey.bsky.social here reminding world about Brigid Brophy. #books

@ianhunt.bsky.social Here is the GMP edition from 1987 with this introduction

[4] from Brigid Brophy, The Finishing Touch, 1963, a brilliant comedy set in a girls's school in the south of France. Writers with a sense of comedy like Brophy were ahead of many claiming 'experimental' territory in the 60s: the writing is technically and stylistically brilliant /

'Tis the season... for fans of Brigid Brophy. Here's the first edition of The Snow Ball, 1964, with BB's inscription to her parents.

this 1969 book is either going to be an extremely prescient, groundbreaking work of fiction or an absolute disaster. no way of telling, really.

Gloriously red as the light begins to subside!

Michael Field in Context (Cambridge University Press) is out today! I'm so excited that this volume is finally out in the world. It features 35 chapters on so many different aspects of Michael Field's lives and work. Find out more/order for your library here: www.cambridge.org/gb/universit...

My article on 'Brigid Brophy's Ethical Aestheticism: Form, Empathy, Reciprocity' is now out in the latest issue of Genre, in a special issue on Aestheticism Now! I'm looking forward to reading all the other articles. You can find the issue here: read.dukeupress.edu/genre/issue/...

“He saw sitting on a branch, a medium sized brown feathered animal with the tail of a tabby cat.” ~ Pussy Owl (1976), Brigid Brophy. #BookWormSat #Jackanory #BBC [🎨Hilary Hayton]

Brigid Brophy's *The Snow Ball* has just been published in German!

Brigid Brophy on the back of Scarlett Thomas' The Sleepwalkers.

Flawless starter pack for an exploration of the fertile land of spinster-lit. I'd also add LOLLY WILLOWES by Sylvia Townsend Warner (along with every other word she wrote)

Windfall greengages masquerading as marzipan fruits or clay marbles.

Rare Clifden Nonpareil? It turned up this p.m.

It's a pretty-patterny sort of afternoon.

48 years ago today, I was attending the Animals’ Rights conference at Trinity College, Cambridge, organised by the RSPCA. My first opportunity to hear Richard Ryder, Brigid Brophy, Clive Hollands, John Bryant, Andrew Linzey, and many others speak out for animals. kimstallwood.substack.com

Lurid borlotti beans and Brigid Brophy

'We are (of all the synonyms I most prefer to ‘humanist’) freethinkers. We are deprived of nothing. We have lost nothing… We are liberated into and given the freedom of the whole kingdom of the imagination.' The inimitable Brigid Brophy died #onthisday 1995. heritage.humanists.uk/brigid-brophy/

'Both my parents were humanists, they determined that my upbringing should be solidly rational. That bedrock gave me stability and my mother steered me from the kind of emotional jumble she had grown up with.' Kate Levey remembers her mother #HumanistHeritage heritage.humanists.uk/article/a-hu...

James Salter. I haven’t read much of him but he’s great. Brigid Brophy is a recent discovery for me but I’d defy A.I. to produce anything like The Snow Ball.

I picked up the Brigid Brophy too. Recently read her book The Finishing Touch, which is a novel about a sapphic headmistress at a finishing school. Protagonist is modeled on a pre-outing* Anthony Blunt, who worked with Brophy's husband! *"Outing" in this sense meaning "as a Soviet spy."

New on the blog this week, I've written about some of my favourite novels set in London. Featuring books by Rosamond Lehmann, Brigid Brophy, Margaret Drabble, Hisham Matar and more! #BookSky #London #Books #BookReview 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/07/10/l...

From the Archive: A review of The Prince and the Wild Geese by Brigid Brophy, first published in the TLS of June 10, 1983

Hoooooo! Brigid Brophy alert! Thank you @thetls.bsky.social

Can’t help thinking the TLS is missing a trick here.