May the Fourth be with you
How do I love thee, Star Wars? Let me count the ways …. Yoda’s syntax. Han Solo (always). Chewy can put androids back together again with furry paws. Leia takes … Continue reading
Coming Up: Science Fiction Week
This is the week of May the Fourth, so the Foxes are rolling around joyously in the mixed metaphors and timeless plots of science fiction. But what is science fiction? … Continue reading
Coming Up this week on Vulpes Libris
The bluebells and the wood anenomes in Hallerbos, a wood south of Brussels near Waterloo, are cranking up their colours. The daffodils in my garden are leaning at an angle … Continue reading
Ladybird Books
The Museum of English Rural Life is a fantastic small museum. It’s in Reading in the UK (part of the university), and has just reopened its exhibiting spaces after a … Continue reading
The historical fictions that history tells us
The Historical Fictions Research Network had its second conference this weekend, in the splendid surroundings of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, home of the Meridian, south-east London. The Network … Continue reading
Let’s celebrate the migrant authors of English literature
One Day Without Us is a British grassroots campaign to celebrate the contributions that EU citizens and migrants from all over the world make and have made to daily British … Continue reading
Giovanni’s Room
I took part in a book pyramid scheme recently. It was a send-it-back, upside-down-tree-connections thing, running through Facebook. My friend D recruited me, so I sent a book to her … Continue reading
Amazing Grace
This 2007 biography of the anti-slavery campaigner and British politician of the eighteenth century, William Wilberforce, begins with a foreword from the then President of Wilberforce University, which he describes … Continue reading
Nine St Andrew’s Night Novels
St Andrew’s Night is the lesser-known Scottish cultural festival. The big one is, of course, Burns’ Night, on 25 January, and is usually a feast, with poetry and music. St … Continue reading
Stoker: The Life of Hilda Matheson, OBE
If you are keen on Bloomsbury and its ramifications, you may already know that Hilda Matheson (1888-1940) was Vita Sackville West’s lover between 1929 and 1931. She wrote to Vita … Continue reading
Frank Fraser Darling’s Island Years, Island Farm
I bought this book at The Ceilidh Place bookshop in Ullapool last week. I’d just taken a blowy boat trip to the Summer Isles, and wanted to read Frank Fraser … Continue reading
Vulpes Random: Everything you need to know about Georgette Heyer’s novels
My younger daughter, aged 18 and a half, has just fallen headlong into Georgette Heyer, and is spending her summer browsing my collection. Occasionally she reports back to me, in … Continue reading
Surreal old people: Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet
This very slim novel is a fantasia on being old, and explores how one would survive when there is very little left to lose in conditions of extreme oddness. The … Continue reading
Hope Jahren’s Lab Girl
Hope Jahren is a scientist, now based in Hawai’i, but she’s worked in and built laboratories all over the USA. She’s a plant scientist, a palaeobotanist and geobiologist, searching for … Continue reading
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