Books

Books · 24 March 2025

Learning to Read for Fun Again After a PhD

Undertaking a doctorate degree, especially a PhD in the humanities, generally means years of being text-bound. Reading papers and books, taking notes, and writing. Rinse and repeat, every day for three to six years. This cycle is, of course, happily interrupted by teaching commitments, conference visits, giving talks or doing community outreach. Yet fundamentally, the written word is at the core and reading and digesting the knowledge of a field means skim-reading thousands and thousands of...

History Books I Enjoyed Reading This Autum

Before Mrs Beeton: Elizabeth Raffald, England’s Most Influential Housekeeper – by Neil Buttery & Blighty or Bust: The Epic 2,000-Mile Escape of WWII prisoner-of-war, Raymond Bailey. In His Own Words – Edited by David Wilkins

Women SciFi Writers Before Mary Shelley - Margaret Cavendish and The Blazing World

Margaret Cavendish wrote utopian SciFi in the 1600s - long before Mary Shelley and others. Her work The Blazing World explores topics such as rulership, gender norms and futuristic technologies.