Always look on the bright side...

Okay, I had to work today, fume whinge, and the new Sat hours mean until late afternoon rather than just the morning, so the whole day is pretty much shot.

However, while it was just busy enough in the special collections area for me not to think what an immense waste of time and energy opening it up at all.

BUT

it was not so busy that I didn't have time to do some stuff off the to-do list, viz, namely:

Write funding application reference.

Get my list of historical details with implications for current policy discussions that I've been asked to do in rather more coherent, bullet-pointy, shape.

Finish my skim re-read of book I'm reviewing and getting started on the actual review (though less done than I'd hoped since it was at that point that someone who needed my professional advice in a fairly extended way came through the door).

So if not a complete win, not an entire fail either.

Linkasserie

Just too late for IBARW:

So horrific are the images conjured up by 'Strange Fruit' that Billie Holiday always performed it with her eyes closed. Caryl Phillips, who used the title for his first play, traces the song's dark history.

Australian novelist Kate Grenville found success with novels about her country's violent history.

International Slavery Museum opens in Liverpool next week.

And some other stuff:

Germaine Greer on Ann Hathaway.

Kathryn Hughes on Penguin's publication of 20 (short) pieces of classic romantic and erotic literature and the Industrial Revolution.

Hermione Lee applauds Alison Light's Mrs Woolf & the Servants.

Shop til you drop C18th style: John Mullan goes on an 18th-century shopping expedition in John Styles and Amanda Vickery's Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830.

Colin Greenland's Sarah Hall's futuristic fable, The Carhullan Army makes it sound as if the separatist feminist commune includes a significant Starkadder contingent:

Over the fetid gloom of Rith brood the dark moors and fells, thrusting through the soft verdure of the lowlands like primeval, inescapable truths. Hall's prose is chunky with local language, colour and landscape: bothies, bields, becks and corbies, hefted flocks and droves of heather.

Ben Goldacre goes WTF, and so do I.

EEEEEE! these were even scarier as a full-page spread in the Guardian Weekend Magazine

(no subject)

Does anyone know how pshtaku is and if she's okay?