oursin | Linkspam out of the dead land (Reply)

Sweden is bringing rabbit showjumping to the London Pet Show (yeah, I'm doing the Bunny Boggle over here - 'hip-hop-hip, wiggle your nose, boggling the bunny is the way it goes' - a justly-forgotten B-side in the Bogglemen's oeuvre).

Oh dear, I'm not sure even being a postmodernist meta-fiction excuses exploiting Ms Evans for fun and profit: Sophie and the Sibyl by Patricia Duncker review – an audience with George Eliot: 'This sprightly postmodern comedy of manners wittily critiques the conventions of the historical novel'. (Query: is not the word 'sprightly' in a review or blurb something that sends a cold shiver down the spine?)

Tribute to Ruth Rendell (and are we not pleased that she and PDJ were pals?) and appreciation.

New translation of Julian of Norwich's Revelation of Divine Love is Nicholas Lezard's paperback of the week.

And, in Dept of Coincidences, Church that gave refuge to Charles I and inspired TS Eliot in need of rescue - shall all be well for Little Gidding. But, WHUT??? no mention of George Herbert?

Also, life lessons from the Rule of St Benedict (ring my be-e-ell, ring my bell).

Hadley Freeman on her definitive movies.

This sounds vaguely creepy to me: can schools teach children how to be better people?

Dept of this is probably just me, groaning away about something that some journo has only just discovered, in this case Boulton and Park, aka Fanny and Stella, of the famous 1870 court case under the sodomy laws, which is so not 'a forgotten story', really, though maybe my own acquaintanceship with the historiography on Victorian homosexuality is the factor here. Even so, I don't think you can make a case that they were 'gay activists of their time' as opposed to two young men by chance caught up in the meshes of the law. (Also, in re Grayson Perry's claim to be 'probably the first tranny at the palace': there are claims that Prince George of Kent was given to cross-dressing along with the bisexuality and drug-addiction.)