It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of a love of history, must be in want of a blog.
This is one of two posts on the notorious Mitford sisters. I have written about the two fascists, Unity and Diana (Lady Mosley) here, and this post is about Jessica the communist, Nancy the novelist and Deborah the duchess. Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Jessica, Deborah and their brother Tom were born between 1904 and 1920 …
Continue reading The Mitford sisters: the duchess, the novelist and the communist
Recently I came across two curious 1840s lithographs from the Library of Congress online image collection. Titled "Stages of Woman's life from the cradle to the grave", both lithographs portray the ideal trajectory of a woman's life according to the prevailing European and North American social norms. The principal feminine virtues depicted are chastity, religion, …
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Pissabed; mare's fart; dead man's fingers. Three of the hundreds of traditional English plant names which, once ubiquitous but now little-known, have been replaced by the much more prosaic taraxacum, jacobaea vulgaris and xylaria polymorpha. A victory for scientific categorisation, perhaps, but arguably a loss for colourful English folklore. Before the professional standardisation of botanical …
Continue reading Pissabed, mare’s fart, dead man’s fingers: Curious old plant names