I have assiduously avoided expressing my own views about controversial matters on Calderonia, as it is simply not a personal blog in that sense. I am as silent as a stone on such things. Sometimes, however, as someone said, even the stones would cry out.
When I arrived at Cambridge University Library on 12 October (see previous post), I walked down the stairs to the lockers and was confronted full on by this poster:
Evidently it was the first blow in the PR/marketing campaign for the Library’s exhibition The Rising Tide: Women at Cambridge (ends 21 March 2020), which I was looking forward to visiting as I left the Library that day.
Immediately after came the second blow: the large noticeboard at the bottom of the stairs had been very carefully composed of fliers featuring exclusively women.
I entered the library proper, went up the stairs to the front corridor, and was hit by the fact that all the usual historic portraits had been removed and replaced by portraits of women…serious-, but sensitive-, intelligent-, unaggressive-looking women; a mistress of Newnham here, a Strachey there, even one who memorably played Masha in a student production of Three Sisters over forty years ago.
Right, I thought, I get the message.
After completing my business with the Pall Mall Gazette, I came out of the Library proper intending to go down into the Milstein Exhibition Centre, but was stopped in my tracks. There in the front hall is a display of ‘merchandise’ for the exhibition: four tiers of mugs inscribed VOTES FOR WOMEN and BEHAVE BADLY, five tiers of tote bags inscribed VOTES FOR WOMEN and BEHAVE BADLY, eight piles of postcards inscribed BEHAVE BADLY, and ten containers with, I estimated, 1000 of these badges in ten different fonts:
I went home.
(To be continued)
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
I was similarly bemused by the merchandise on offer at the Royal Academy Antony Gormley exhibition a week or so ago. Inevitably you exit through the gift shop where you can replenish your supply of art books, fridge magnets, posters etc. But in this case also the Gormley-selected cycling jacket and, incredibly, the Gormley-created Eau de Parfum, both at £150 a pop. I sense that a Faustian pact has been entered into.
Here are some pictures I took of them:
Wonderful! Thank you, Nick: I think you are right about a pact with the D….