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Another dire idea in approximately the same category as 'cosy sitcom about funny suffragettes': Cecil, George and Bert, the only young men left in the sleepy provincial village Rittle-On-Sea who are either too scared, morally challenged or physically disfigured to sacrifice their lives for the great war. Do we feel that this merits being mentioned in the same room, never mind the same breath, as Blackadder Goes Forth? We totally think not.

Yet another somewhat patronising piece about a great British women's institution: The Women's Institute is enjoying a resurgence among the UK's young city-dwellers. And no wonder: it's progressive ethos is perfectly compatible with modern ideals. I omit the actual headline, which invokes the usual J&J cliche, kill it with fire. Though at least there is recognition of the stereotyping with which it's often depicted.

I am somewhat cheered by this piece on how practising something for inordinate numbers of hours will not necessarily make you an Olympic champion/great musician, and that it depends to a significant extent on your existing endowment of capacities that can be purposefully trained.

I thought this was going to be yet another instance of male writer has epiphany as a result of FATHERHOOD, but makes some intriguing points:

Connolly... speaks out of a long and toxic tradition that sets art (ethereal, otherworldly, all unravished brides of quietness and unreal cities) against the mundane domestic world. It's particularly toxic for men, since it suggests that in order to be true to your work, to have a chance to do it well, you must betray, or at least skimp on the commitments you've made to your partner and your children. It's an idea that has given a license to generations of male writers to behave – not to put too fine a point on it – like assholes. Moreover, it's blind to the idea that being a father, with its intense, earth-shattering experience of love, could ever provide material for art.

This sympathetic history of hostilities faced by Travellers and Gypsies sounds intriguing, but is it the author or the reviewer who believes Sanskrit is 'spoken in northern India'?

Kathryn Hughes administers a few light taps with the codfish to Victoria's Madmen by Clive Bloom, and we are inclined ourselves to file it under Yet Another Book Yet Again Undermining Stereotypes of the Victorians, We Have Been Here So Often Before, When Will It Ever End. However, Hughes does suggest that though the book is bitty, and doing that thing that I notice far too much of these days, which is vignettes where the reader is supposed to do any work of teasing out the connecting thread, it:

does throw familiar Victorians and their situations up in the air and allow them to fall in unexpected and often intriguing patterns.

Not only is she going to be on banknotes, her shadow still falls heavily on litfic: joint review of two new J Austen hommage novels. One of which sounds of some merit, doing the equivalent of The Wind Done Gone by taking the servants' view of P&P. The other hits at what I have noticed in other 'updates' of Austen's plots:

Austen's women were privileged but they were also trapped, as women today are not, by financial dependence, by social convention, by the requirement to make a good marriage. The Adair girls have no such limitations and, as such, their struggles lack depth. Melancholy emerges as petulance, regret as self-pity. The Adairs' troubles are born less of bitter circumstance than of passivity, of a belief in a birthright that was never theirs to believe in. If Hall had tackled this – the entitlement culture of the 21st century; the belief that the beautiful deserve to be happy – it might have made for a fascinating novel.

Interesting woman: After the second world war, a team of art experts tried to rescue the thousands of artworks stolen by the Nazis. Now Anne Olivier Bell, the last of the 'Monuments Men', is to be the subject of a George Clooney film - and as my dr rdrz surely know already, she was also the editor of Virginia Woolf's diaries.

Returning to the theme of public intellectuals: an account of the 'Two Cultures' dingdong between CP Snow and FR Leavis. It is taking a pro-FRL stance, and we, ourselves, are making like a goldfish at the intelligence that CPS ever thought that he might have been in the running for the Nobel Prize for literature, and only lost it as a result of this attack.