Not sufficient, but certainly necessary

Tristram Hunt says his success is down to hard work, and then goes on to describe his upbringing.

Ahem. Yes, I quite agree that it is totally infuriating to read the far too many diatribes by people who think that everybody can 'hard work' their way out of desperate situations.

But, on the other prickly paw, there are people who had the kinds of advantages that Hunt had, and are nothing like as successful as he is.

I will certainly concede that a part of any success that I can lay claim to is due to adventitious factors such as being born at a particular time into a particular society, to a particular family which, though poor, believed in education and did not consider it wasted on girls, having encouragement from teachers, etc. And further on to being in the right place at the right time.

But I don't discount that I actually did things myself that built on those advantages, that weren't handed to me on a plate. I was really pissed off when the other half of the Slow Motion Train Wreck Relationship told me how lucky I was to have the job I did after I'd got the upgrade to the professional band: well, yes, but part of that was also sticking on through the period with the line-manager from heck, giving up time and energy to getting my professional diploma, and also, actually being Damn Good At The Job.

And subsequently, yes, I've been lucky and some of that was down to right place, right time, right contacts: but it was also spotting certain niches and putting in some serious hard work.

I may have mentioned before a person who used to be associated with Academic Institution I Have The Honour To Be Associated With, in one of its earlier incarnations, who used to be Wonder Boy and had turned into Boring Old Fart. Who had numerous advantages of background and education (and gender?) and was expected to do great things but (I think) had a fatal disinclination to put in the hours applying seat of pants to seat of chair in solitude as opposed to Performing Brilliance in public settings.

So I don't think one should discount anyone's hard work as if it had nothing at all to do with their success.

A little linkspam with the mulled wine, perhaps?

Vogue launches online archive of every American issue in its 119-year history. Yeah, okay, $1,575 is a lot for a year's subscription from the point of view of the individual punter interested in the history that this could disclose: but in terms of what academic journals and some of the other major press databases cost it's minute.

Bluuuuue Moooooon: Deborah Orr says something I agree with rather than just going 'meh' and turning the page: Women should be able to choose to end a pregnancy without having to pretend that continuing it would drive them to despair. Sing it.

Simone Webb (aged 18), Underage sex isn't automatically a problem. Young women are not uniquely vulnerable. What's important is that anyone having sex at any age should be making a free and informed choice. So true.

Interesting piece about scientists and reputation - the issues are hardly confined to the worlds of the sciences:

[E]ngraving their names in stone and bronze creates difficulties. It forces us to make them unblemished icons, or conversely tempts us to demonize them. This rush to beatify brings down a weight of moral expectation few of us could shoulder.

Can I just say aaaaargh to this claim from Sue Arnold's review of an audiobook version of the recent bio of Wallis Simpson, apropos the state of sexual ignorance in interwar Britain, 'The Technique of Sex, the first manual on the subject, published in 1939, sold half a million copies in hardback alone and remained in print for 50 years', demonstrating a sad lack of knowledge of the history of the sex manual in the UK (Marie Stopes's Married Love, 1918, Theodor van de Velde's Ideal Marriage, English translation, by Stella Browne, 1928... do I need to go on?).

Jonathan Jones gets poncey about illuminated manuscripts:

Books have never been cherished more than they were in the middle ages. The exhibition at the British Library is a window on a world when the written word was truly valued and reading truly mattered. We, who may be witnessing and participating in the death of the book as an object, are in no position to patronise these medieval readers who adored their books so much they wanted their pages to be glorified with gold. The golden books of the middle ages survive from a world that saw learning as light.

As we see the ambiguous – to say the least – consequences for the book of the technological revolution of our time, a technocratic approach to European intellectual history makes little sense. Printing does not equal progress. European culture was supposedly liberated by printing in the 15th and 16th centuries. Print meant more readers, a greater reach for new books, the standardisation of editions of old ones. It created a new world of publishing that has endured for half a millennium. But were these changes all for the good? In reality, it can be argued, the greatest age of learning was the era of the illuminated book.

Please to pass me a tastefully illuminated codfish to adminster a higher codswallop to Mr Jones.

Rereading: What Shall We Have for Dinner? As the celebrations for Charles Dickens's bicentenary next year begin in earnest, spare a thought this Christmas for his wife, Catherine, who published her own book of dinner menus:

The selection shows considerable culinary interest and knowledge. The grand menus are fascinating, requiring a grasp of seasonality (Catherine gives the months that each menu could be served) and a practical understanding of what a female cook (rather than a trained chef) working with limited oven and stove-top space in an urban kitchen could produce.