Scott's Miscellany

Book review: Distant Thunder by TD Griggs

I’ve never been a great lover of Imperial Britain: the stories of heroic men heroically destroying indigenous cultures has never seemed to me all that… heroic. Or good. Or worthwhile. It may be a history of our land, but on the whole, I’d rather not know the gory details. But then TD Griggs produced ‘Distant [...]

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2014 Dates: Dreaming Courses

Dreaming Courses

Save the Dates ( If you’re interested in going on a waiting list for any course not listed, drop me a line .) Basic Foundation Course: 4th – 6th April 2014 – at Poulstone Other Courses in 2014 are: Fire Gate: 21st – 23rd March 2014 – at Holycombe

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Review: Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle

Reviews

My partner has a first in English Lit, my degrees are all in veterinary medicine and I am constantly grateful for the fact that nobody tried to teach me to read. By an large, this means that we have very different tastes in books although inevitably we’re overlapping more as the years progress. Once in [...]

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“She-Zow” – cartoons for the twenty first century

feminism

We so, so need these to come to UK TV: Twelve year old, Guy Hamdon accidentally becomes a superhero, but the ring that gives him his powers was only meant to be worn by a woman. So whenever there’s danger, Guy transforms into SheZow, a kick-ass female superhero with big hair, high heels and a [...]

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Bra-less is best

feminism

Some of us have always known this – but at last we have actual scientific proof that bras are worse than useless. As reported here in the Huffington Post and here in a Franco-English online paper BRAS do nothing to help support a woman’s breasts and could even be doing damage. Professor Jean-Denis Rouillon of [...]

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The Matilda Effect: Unconscious bias in science -and reading

feminism

There was a time when I thought I wasn’t a feminist. I was young, gay (in all senses) and worked in the male-dominated field of veterinary surgery and truly believed that as long as I could anaesthetise the next horse and get it safely back on its feet without killing it – which is a [...]

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The Art of War: 555 Page Tour

writing

Rome: The Art of War is my thirteenth novel and it’s 2013 and I thought I’d like to do something different to mark this. So, by way of an experiment, we’re going to try the 555 page tour – that’s the book touring, not me. I have here a copy of the book. I’m going [...]

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Review: The Scent of Death by Andrew Taylor

Reviews

This has been my Easter reading: a chance to plunge once more into a time and place I know nothing about, in the company of one of the absolute masters of our genre – in fact, one of the masters of fiction, who takes the genre boundaries and bends them to breaking with a style [...]

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Blog tour: Lesbian Fiction Q/A

LGBT

I’ll highlight the various blogs of the tour here so there’s a permanent record rather than the ever-falling Facebook and Twitter stream. So the first one is a something-different Q/A with the LesFic blog Taster below, click the link for the whole thing: Your Boudica and Rome series include a mixture of historical and fictional [...]

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Review: Redemption Blues

Reviews

Tim Griggs’ ‘Redemption Blues’ is one of those ‘don’t start it ten o’clock at night’ books because if you do, you’ll still be there, bleary eyed at 4 am the next morning trying to get through just one more chapter before you finally get some sleep. Except you won’t, of course (sleep). I read it [...]

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