I thank The Little Professor for the inspiration for this post; she regularly posts a list of her week’s book purchases and it makes fascinating (and often tempting) reading. Her list this week is here.
I was going to start this last week, but it would have been embarrassingly large. (I went mad with a 3 for 2 offer in Waterstone’s.) This week I was rather more continent.
So here it is:
* Woman in World History: Her Place in the Great Religions, E.M. White, Herbert Jenkins, London, 1924, on which I posted here.
* An English Wife in Berlin, “A private memoir of events, politics and daily life in Germany through the war and the social revolution of 1918”, by Evelyn, Princess Blucher, an English aristocrat married to a German prince – very readable. I’m trying to find out when she died – there’s a Princess Blucher in London just before WWII, but I’m not sure if it is the same one; all information welcome! Constable and Co, London, 1920.
* Alexis, by Marguerite Yourcenar. I found this 20th-century French historical fiction writer through the Women writers group, which has just finished reading The Abyss, as have I – a very interesting exploration of 16th-century Europe.
* The House of Doctor Dee, P. Ackroyd, which I bought and read yesterday after being asked by someone who knows I live in Clerkenwell how close to reality the geography in it was. I’m not entirely an Ackroyd fan – he does get rather too mystical for me, and this is one of his most mystical ones; The Clerkenwell Tales was much better.
* Feminism and Islam: Legal and Literary Perspectives, M. Yamani (ed)New York University Press, 1996. (Now remaindered for £4 in Unsworths opposite the British Museum, for anyone interested.) I haven’t had time to look at it yet.
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