....there is no objective, capital T Truth about Agrippina. There is only a series of stories, drawn from other people's stories about men. The only way through is to be hon-est about that. This story is as much mine as it is Agrippina's, because I have chosen how to present the information I have. But it is a good story about a woman who deserves her own place in history.
...made the three sisters the first living women ever to be identified by name on a Roman coin.
I wasn't expecting David Cameron to turn up in the first few pages of this....
pickBeautiful book about Nicholson's paintings of Scotland.
I find Switzerland most appealing between the ages of fifty-two and seventy-one. Much younger than that, and the clean air, healthy living, reserved manners and somewhat bland cooking puts me off.
---
Probably not for the Swiss tourist board, this one...
He put the phone down and tapped his fingers on the desk. The alibi thing was annoying when the video call would so easily prove his whereabouts, but the police clearly hadn't even bothered to check it with his nana yet. A single person, living alone, not going to stupid neighbour fireworks things, and suddenly you were a murder suspect.
Wow - the bookmark auction project has already raised over £7000 for charity - a school in Zimbabwe ??
"Famous" children's illustrators' work going for ££ - Axel Shaeffer was over £150 the last time I looked, but many beautiful ones are less than £15. One of the ones above I've got a bid on- any guesses?
Check out the art https://www.jumblebee.co.uk/auction/detail/auction_id/1754479/
Gary Younge giving a rousing argument for political engagement (instead of the history talk I was hoping for: but it was excellent anyway).
Madame Elysé spoke for three minutes and forty-seven seconds. The silence that followed seemed interminable. As I stood at the podium, a gentle sound filled the Great Hall of Justice, the sound of tears.
I waited to address the Court.
Later, after the morning session was over... Madame Elysé... turned to me.....
'May I ask a question?'
'Yes.'
'Why did it take so long for us to come to The Hague?'
So many cute, original works-of-art bookmarks... I can't choose!
https://www.jumblebee.co.uk/bookmarkproject2025
Apple TV Release date is tomorrow! Woo! 😍
so-soMixed feelings about this one. Covering the 100 years of Rosa's life, from a Polish pogrom to a garden in Morningside in the early 2000s. Wonderfully Scottish (well, mostly Edinburgh), and with a message surely no one can argue with: conflict is bad.
For me, a bit too ambitious - and heavy on the historical exposition.
Edinburgh skyline (near Dean Village)
#WomensPrizeLL25
'Things will get better now, won't they, Mummy?' says Jan. 'Now that we have a Labour government.'
Muriel smooths a sleeve with her left hand and plies the iron with her right. 'Yes, things will get better.'
'I like Mr Attlee. He has a nice face.'
'They'll have to work fast,' Bruce says. 'Five years isn't very long to make everything happen that they've promised.'
>>>>>
Did you get that at the back? A new Labour Government! Fancy that!
A book I bought in Edinburgh and couldn't resist picking up to read straight away.
Reading my own shelves!
Nora looks out at the priceless view. There‘s a break in the cloud and enough blue to clothe any number of sailors.
----
My gran used to say this - an expression I've not heard in a while.
On the platform below, the bookstall's yellow awning
reads Hachette: Banish Monotony and Ennui. The word banish makes Maurice think of villains sent abroad and never allowed to return to France. Georges says if Maurice listens to his elders and reads every spare minute he gets, one day he'll know all the words there are and could even be a school-teacher.
Part of a piece by Ciara Phillips as part of "Undoing It"
https://galleryofmodernart.blog/exhibitions/
"This is not just a grab bag candy game. This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently.... This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain..."
A few lovely bookish places in Edinburgh, including the displays at https://www.nationalgalleries.org/visit/scottish-national-gallery-modern-art and https://www.glasgowlife.org.uk/museums/venues/gallery-of-modern-art-goma
During victory marches, captured enemy warriors walked along as proudly as they could... but with their hearts in their throats: dying on the sacrifice stone was no picnic...
...they would watch the crowd waving their little flags and tossing flowers, imagining that eventually one of these bastards would buy a strip of warrior arm or loin in the marketplace to eat in magic tomato salsa on a tostada.😪😬🤮🔪🥣🍖
You who take so much for granted, with your sound walls, rich food and fine jewels and books, especially books do you truly begrudge the people of this or any other lowly parish their little scraps of coloured glass, their painted saints, their confidence in prayer? How cruel you are, if you do.
These blue flowers obey no man; they come to no one's bidding and they die in their own season, their beauty while they live a careless rapture.
Stripped of the bleak comforts of such an illusion, she has simply been done to, which makes her a victim.
She doesn't know if she'd give it a lower-case or capital V if.she had to write it down unsure if it's an identity, a predicament or both. All she's certain of is that decades of defying the definition have ended, so that things which used to seem inevitable now feel intolerable.
It hurts so much to realise she deserved better...
so-soI picked this up as it had been LL for the Booker international prize for fiction, and I've not read anything by an author from Reunion before (pictured, via Unsplash).
Relentless book that simultaneously describes a child growing up and events in the surrounding community, from weddings to violence. I thought it was going in the direction of the typical "but I made good" narrative, so the ending caught me out!
So when nothing's going right, when the walls get so high that even prayers can't help you scale them, I open a comic book. As if leaning over a precipice, I dive right in, seeking a different world where no one can find me and I can forget. I have a book on my bedside table. Because I don't have a gun.
From then on, I demanded that the Dessaintes call me Ratus, much to their dismay! And I began to regularly commit a crime that neither of them would have dreamt of: I read! Worse still, I enjoyed it! Thoroughly. So thoroughly that I worked out how to beat those scoundrels: I would read, and invent stories, and make my own books. I would rise above my station and go places people couldn't imagine me in.
pickNot a book to read when you are feeling thirsty.
In the midst of a future Cape Town when water is privatised and in short supply. Deidre is drunk, and blaming everyone else for her problems, despite never having worked or even acknowledged the help she *has* been given.
Will the discovery of buried secrets at her old family home change her attitude?
#WomensPrizeLL25
There's a strong urge to go out there where the shooting is, so it'll all just end instantaneously.
In those moments... I always get a text:
"Summer's still on! Tam-Tam Group boutiques invite you to come in and see their new collection of swimsuits ..."
Those boutiques and I are all in the same city. They see all the same news I do.
I swear to you, my dear Tam-Tam Group: after all this is over, the first thing I'll do is visit you.
Only after dinner would their father loosen up.... he would describe to the eight children sitting before him the monsters whose shadows he glimpsed when he went to the fields at four in the morning - hanged monsters with swollen tongues, giant highway-bandits, creatures who were half woman, half fish. This was the children's favourite time, these stories told by the light of a kerosene lamp, the huge centipedes chasing around the wooden benches.
I'm a sucker for a book about banned books...
"Did it work? "We should build a monument to books", argues the Polish dissident Adam Michnik. ""I am convinced it was books that were victorious in the fight", he tells the author."
I look over at my sister lying on top of the piano singing 'Graceland'. I don't know if it's the best song to dance to, but V's dancing anyway, slowly, with his arms loosely around Xabi's neck, looking the happiest I've ever seen him. Happier even than when he got a flip phone for Christmas.
🤣🤣
Holidays are here and it's time for a crime spree in St Andrews...
... but only in the special postgraduate areas designed for crying and printing out hundred-page documents...
Everything was going well with the dinner. No one brought up colonisation or euthanasia or the Springbok Tour.
Taken me a while, but getting into this now.
Which is a good job given that bookclub meets by the end of the month!
All those people who go on about how beautiful babies were, their wonderful smell and so on and so forth should have their heads examined. Here she was praying for a few minutes of soul-saving solitude before visitors can banging on her door, and there he was screaming as if somebody had lit a fire under him.
Starting my attempt to read (some of) the books discussed in Barbara Boswell's discussion of black women's writing from South Africa.
This copy came from the US (thankyou biblio.com), but had a sticker on the back saying £3.50. It also looks like someone has very carefully restitched it back together. Love a book with a bit of history!
I'm not talking to them. Or to Putin. In this speech, I'm talking to myself.
"Don't be afraid in love. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to love... Ukraine is such a great joy..."
The cultural attaché from the Embassy of Kazakhstan pulls me aside and says, "Hold on. Hold on out there. We're neutral, of course. But we are aware that we're next. Those people will come to 'protect' our Russian-speakers if you give up. So don't give up! Hold on..."
Loving the crime fiction references in this series...
Great to catch Kaliane Bradley speak about her last book - and hear about the new one too...
