Philobiblon

I spent yesterday at the Roehampton University Renaissance Lives Annual Conference, which was brilliant. I really liked the fact that the sessions didn’t mostly consist of papers being read out, but of short off-the-cuff explanations of research, followed by wide discussion.

And the discussion, while sometimes focused on detail – with lots of excellent stuff about women’s lives – was mostly about the big issues of writing about history – are biographies and biographers writing about archetypes or individual lives; can you recover historical emotions? what is autobiography/life-writing (is using this description for a tomb taking things too far?); do biographical subjects still have agency after their death? what impact will technology have on the discipline (more focus on communal rather than individual lives through the ability to analyse large amounts of data was the answer given, although I think inter-discipinarianism is more important personally) – the description of this as “thick historicism” was accurate, I thought.

But the day started with what someone later labelled “classic 19th-century old historicism”, with David Starkey talking about his biography of Henry VIII. You had to give him marks as a performer, there was more than a hint of mischief-making, and it certainly woke up everyone first thing in the morning, so I guess you could say he did his job.

But I wasn’t the only one bristling at the statement “all historical progress depends on sons quarrelling with their fathers”, while the claim that historians “from council houses” just couldn’t understand war, the aristocracy and the like certainly did raised others’ blood pressure. (This was despite the fact that he later contradicted the “sons” remark by attributing the entire English Reformation to Anne Boleyn, or at least to Henry’s sexual desire for her! He claimed the only “Protestants” in England before her influence were a small number – who “would have fitted into a Portakabin” – at the “fleapit” of Cambridge. Not from what I know of the London of the time …)

But, as I said, it was entertaining.

… hold the front page. The Observer proclaims the rise of the New Puritan – “A generation of young, educated and opinionated people determined to sidestep the consumerist perils of modern life.”

It also runs a scare story about the new drinking laws, but it also manages to conclude that a significant group of young people are trying to live in a healthy, green way. (I tend to agree, in part I guess because I’m a bit of one myself (without the “young” bit).

Two nicely matched articles in today’s Guardian – wondering why society today is so gullible – focusing particularly on bird flu hysteria. When the front page of The Sun is taken up by a death of a bird meaning, in its terminology, the feathered kind, there must be a new “dead parrot” sketch in there somewhere – but then again, perhaps it is beyond parody.

I could hardly believe that anyone had given this stuff a thought, until I went into my local small Sainsbury this evening and found poultry of all descriptions covered in half-price or less stickers. Just had a very nice expensive free-range duck breast fillet (baked in honey and mustard-seed mustard in case you were wondering) that usually would have been £3. It cost me £1.20 – I foresee poultry meat being the predominate source of protein in my diet in the immediate future.

Then, the Guardian, debunking one scare (while it continues elsewhere to promote bird flu) runs an expose on the lab that keeps finding MRSA everywhere. Funnily enough, none of the other, accredited labs, which happen to be run by trained scientists, can.

So all those poor senior citizens terrified out of their wits – that if they touched an NHS door-handle they were going to die – were misled by their newspapers. It’d be nice to think the pensioners will know better next time.

In other news, as (nearly) always Matthew Parris offers an original take on the news. You mightn’t have thought it was possible to find a new angle on the Tory leadership contest, but he has, and although I’ve only been resident in England for seven years and wouldn’t presume therefore to claim to more than dimly understand the class system (although I’m sure it is still going strong): it is that the rise of David Cameron is the return of the toffs.

No, not a sentiment you’ll see often on this blog, but I am talking historically. In the Twenties, I’ve learnt from a biography of the palaeontologist Dorothea Bate (of which more soon), it financed “to the tune of some “thousands of pounds” (rather a lot then) the archaeological excavation of the Roman fortress and ampitheatre at Caerleon in Wales.

Of course the pay-off was exclusive news, but as a promotional method it makes a nice change from free CDs, DVDs and other dross now falling, it seems, out of every newspaper in the land. They’re one of the reasons I’m switching over to entirely web-based newspaper reading – such a horrible waste of resources, when they go straight from the shop to the bin, without even emerging from the plastic wrapper.

Perhaps someone could revive this as a promotional method? (I say in hope rather than expectation – would no doubt be considered far too high-brow.)

Today’s Diaries of a Lady of Quality entry is actually a letter from Lord Alvaney, who seems to me a self-conscious wit, as he makes fun of the doubtful virtues of taking the waters at Buxton, still a big tourist centre.

“Animated by the appetite, which even the diluent powers of common water, assisted by the vibrations of diurnal exercise and the collisive hilarity of reciprocal salutation, would give to a body obstructed by gluttony and rest — they devour with deleterious hunger a farinaceous sponge, the interstices of which are inundated with butter, which might smile at the peristaltic exertions of an elephant, and of which the digestion would be no less an evil than the obstruction.”

Pretentious maybe, but it is still rather fun in its orotund syllables. (Yes, I had to look up farinaceous too – “Made from, rich in, or consisting of starch”. Anyone know what dish is being insulted – just bread?)

No prizes for guessing who is the subject of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography’s daily feature. (That link will only work for a couple of days.)

But I’d like to spare a thought for Nelson’s poor wife (while Lady Hamilton gets to swan around in all of the glamorous reflected glory).

…Nelson married Frances Nisbet at Nevis on 11 March 1787. In June the Boreas sailed for home, soon followed by Mrs Nelson in a merchant ship. Nelson and his wife spent the next five years in England on half-pay, much of the time with his father in Norfolk. Frances, who had lived all her life in the West Indies, was severely tried by Norfolk winters in a draughty parsonage …

[then he was a humble junior naval officer. By the time he was a national hero …}

…In September [1802] Lady Hamilton had bought for him Merton Place, Surrey, and there he now settled with the Hamiltons. His relatives were frequent visitors, having swiftly deserted Lady Nelson and echoed Emma Hamilton’s spiteful remarks about her; only his old father declined to break off relations with her. He died in 1802, and that summer Nelson and the Hamiltons went on a triumphal progress across England and south Wales.