While trying to write (well I have made 2,000 words of the 3,000 words target; just have to write 4,000 tomorrow), I ended up searching for myself on google, with interesting results.

My master’s thesis on the cyber world comes up on a “body building porn” site!! (I won’t bother to point you to that one).

And a piece I wrote on the Rosetta stone has been translated into Spanish for what seems to be an Egyptology site; nice to think someone thought it worth the effort, thanks!

In the 1670s and 1680s, “coffee itself was often identified as ‘puritanical’, ‘seditious’ and ‘Whig’, whereas ale or tea was often seen as ‘conformist’, ‘loyal’ and ‘Tory’.”

Must be off to Starbucks then …. yes I know that’s not a PC statement, but after living in Bangkok for a few years I can hardly explain to you how wonderful it was when Starbucks arrived: air-conditioned, no smoking, no alcohol, and no women with numbers on their dresses: Starbucks and Irish theme pubs made Bangkok a far more livable place.

from M. Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England, Penn State Uni Press, 1999, p. 6.

Engine-looms making silk ribbons grew more common after the Restoration and there were riots in London in August 1675 against their use.
“Trouble started on the night of Sunday 8 August around Moorfields, and over the next four days spread to Spitalfields, Stepney, Whitechapel, Cloth Fair and Blackfriars … and also beyond that to Stratford le Bow, Westminster, and Southwark. .. One report claimed that there were ‘reckoned to be above 30,000’ tumultuous weavers in the City of London alone …. at least 85 engine-looms belonging to 24 different owners were destroyed.
… of the 201 suspects who eventually appeared in court, 11 were females. This is in contrast to the more specifically political riots of the reign, for which there is no evidence of female participation.”
From T. Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II, Cambridge Uni Press, 1987, p. 193.

Just up the road from me, in Chancery Lane, in 1666 was born Mary “Moll” Jones. Her parents were hopeless debtors; she worked as a hoodmaker, then married an apprentice with extravagent tastes. Turning to pickpocketing to support this, she was caught stealing from Jacob Belafay, chocolate-maker to James II and William III. Branded on the hand, she turned to shoplifting for four years, for which she was again branded. Eventually caught stealing a piece of satin from a shop on Ludgate Hill, she was hanged at Tyburn at the age of 25 on 18 December 1691.
From A. Brooke and D. Branden, Tyburn: London’s Fatal Tree, Sutton, Thrupp, 2004, p. 93.

I just got around to looking up Catherine Andras, and found this short biography and an apparent picture of the Nelson model, said to be still in Westminster Abbey. (A pretty amazing survival if true.)

So it seems women could “go it alone”, or almost. Still from Nelson’s Women:

“… the intelligent, socially aware Cornelia Knight, an admiral’s daughter aged forty-two who had written a novel and was touring the Continent with her mother, who had herself met Dr Johnson and his circle. While staying at a hotel in Naples, both became friends of Sir William and Lady Hamilton, although more sincerely attached to the former than the latter. Miss Knight kept a mordant eye on the eccentric Neapolitan court, describing how the King ‘used to pass out house on his way to the lake where he caught gulls that he sold to the fish-dealers’ and that the Queen was subject to ‘fits of devotion, at which times she stuck short prayers amd pious ejaculations inside of her stays, and occasionally swallowed them’.” (p. 104)

A quick resort to the invaluable abebooks tells me there is a biography, unpromisingly titled “The Prim Romantic”, from 1965 … and her Dinabarbis is available in a joint edition with Johnson’s Rasselas; now how can I justify buying them ….?

P.S. Quoted without comment, Emma Hamilton, as rumours of the Battle of the Nile were circulating: “The newspapers have tormented and almost killed me in regard to the desperate action you have fought with the French fleet. How human faculties can be brought to make others intentionally miserable I cannot conceive. In my opinion, a newspaper writer, or fabricator for them, is a despicable creature bearing a human shape.” (p. 107)