Society

People are quite often pilloried for saying the opposite of what they actually said. I have read Hilary Mantel’s London Review of Books lecture, and she is quite clearly not attacking the Duchess of Cambridge, but criticising what it is that people try to turn royal women into. When she speaks of the Duchess as ‘a jointed doll on which certain rags were hung’, or ‘the spindles of her limbs’ being ‘hand-turned and gloss-varnished’, she is talking about what the media and public opinion want of her. She discusses appearance, and offers no opinion about the young woman’s reality. She is sympathising with a female predicament, and she does the

I am pleased to report that my eight ducks have survived the great chill, when their pond was frozen over; for during all that time no fox ever ventured across the ice to kill them. And now that the ice has melted they are looking much more frolicsome and less forlorn. But strange things have been going on among my chickens. All eight of them, too, are alive and well (maybe all foxes now live in towns), but their laying habits have become very eccentric. Finding eggs never ceases to be exciting, even for someone of my advanced age, but I got a nasty shock the other day when I

I can’t quite believe the number of professional historians who have denounced Michael Gove’s new history curriculum. Richard Evans, for instance, the Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. Scarcely a day passes without him launching an attack on the Education Secretary. He has denounced the new curriculum as ‘a mindless regression to the patriotic myths of the Edwardian era’. What he objects to is not just the facts that children will be expected to learn, but the manner in which they’ll be taught. He believes that children should spend their time learning ‘analytical skills’ rather than mere facts. Asking them to memorise facts is ‘rote learning’ and only suitable