Suspects.

A couple of nature-related things:

Beavers provide a boost for declining pollinators, study reveals: 'beaver-created wetlands are home to greater numbers of hoverflies and butterflies than human-created equivalents.' Go beavers!

Given that there is reputed to be A Very Large Cat already around those parts, do you really want to start re-introducing the European wildcat to Devon, huh?

Felis silvestris has been absent from mid-Devon for more than a century, but the area has been judged to have the right kind of habitat to support a population of the wildcat. The area has the woodland important for providing cover and den sites while its low intensity grasslands and scrubland create good hunting terrain. According to the study, the wildcats would not be harmful to humans or to farm livestock and pets.

For a reintroduction project in the south-west to succeed, the study says there would have to be cooperation with local communities and cat welfare organisations to support a neutering programme for feral and domestic cats.

I was fascinated by the concept of this project: Supernatural Law: Regulating the Paranormal :

We invite chapters that explore how law responds to, regulates, or resists belief and
behaviour in matters that cannot be proven. What role has law played historically in shaping
society’s understanding of the paranormal? With what intentions has it intervened and
which values and ideologies has it sought to uphold? What can we learn from law’s
engagement with the paranormal?

***

This is rather lovely: 'Happiness and tears' as Sikhs see rare outing of ancient holy book; though one does rather have questions seeing that it appears to have been loot from the Anglo-Sikh Wars:

The scripture was formerly in the possession of the Maharaja Kharak Singh, ruler of the Punjab, and taken from the fort at Dullewalla in India during its capture in 1848. It was presented to the university by Sir John Spencer Login, who also brought the Koh-I-Noor to Queen Victoria, through the Rev W H Meiklejohn of Calcutta.

Trishna Kaur-Singh, Edinburgh University's honorary Sikh chaplain and director of Sikh Sanjog who was at the event, said she wanted the book to remain in Scotland.
She said: "I know people talk about repatriation and that's fine and it's needed in many instances but you have to take into context the fact that the people are here because of that colonial past and have lived their whole lives here.
"They have been parted from their history and their links and it was found here so it should be here for our communities for generations.

Full scan of Bill Brandt's 1938 photo-essay A Night in London (very few surviving copies).

What I read

Finished The Golden Notebook - had a few comments about Lessing and blokes and plus ca change and allotropes of excuses in yesterday's post.

Decompressed with a Dick Francis, Slay-Ride (1973), which is the one set in Norway - period at which The War, resistance, Quislings etc still hangs heavy over them - not a top specimen of his, I spotted Dodgy Person very early on (but maybe protag does not read thrillers....).

Then got a jump on the next volume in the Dance to the Music of Time reading group, Temporary Kings (#11), which is the one set at some kind of cultural conference in Venice.

Also the latest Literary Review.

On the go

Continuing to dip in to Some Men in London 1960-1967.

Was agreeably surprised by the arrival of my preordered Cat Sebastian (had forgotten it was due), After Hours at Dooryard Books, which is being v good so far.

Up next

Latest Slightly Foxed.

Not OK? Booker winner Flesh ignites debate about state of masculinity

No, really, you don't say? Can it be that - once again, or perhaps, still MASCULINITY IS IN CRISIS?

Does it not sound as though the author goes in for 'dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension'? (Sigh.)

I am sorry to discover that an excoriating retrospect on John Fowles with particular reference to The Magus by DJ Taylor in the latest Literary Review does not appear to be fully accessible online, chiz, chiz -

[E]ach of his novels when stripped of its fashionable appurtenances - The Magus, for example, is rife with Jungian animas - is ultimately about male entitlement.... the books are all about men expecting to get the things they want and being mortified by their absence.
....
[A] series of exercises in what Maurice Bowra called 'the higher bogus'.

I note that there was a BBC programme last night on the 'manosphere': young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives. They sound rather sad and confused. (And historian is appalled at the persistence of a panic drummed up by an early C18th quack....)

Am trying to think of period when one could reliably say that masculinity was not in (some kind of) crisis.

The Spanish government has granted citizenship to 170 descendants of volunteers in the International Brigades in recognition of their fight against fascism.

The daughter of a Manchester man who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War has reflected on his "incredible feat of solidarity" as her family is set to become Spanish citizens.

‘We don’t even know all of what we have.’ Howard fights to preserve Black newspapers.

“We don’t even know all of what we have,” Mr. Nightingale marvels.
The basement is a trove of artifacts, including old editions of Black-owned newspapers that tell the life of Black Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries. Articles cover slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. The archive project, which is part of the university’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is bringing to life the faces of yesterday by merging them with the digital world of today. This way, the hope is, they won’t be lost ever again.

Disentangling obscured women: One Artist – ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ – Dismembered To Create Two: or The Importance Of Biography:

Googling ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ led me to the ArtUK page for ‘Mary Katharine [sic] Constance Lloyd’, which included birth and death dates and a short biography[i]. It was then only the work of a moment to discover on Ancestry that the woman with the given dates was not a Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd but a Katharine Constance Lloyd. How peculiar, I thought, and looked again at the ArtUK page. It then seemed obvious that the paintings displayed were unlikely to all be by the same hand. Four, including the one described by Birrell in the chapter on ‘Mary’, might be classed as ‘impressionist’, while the others were formal portraits of worthy 20th-century gentlemen, attired in various robes of office.
A little more online research established that there was, indeed, another artist with a similar name, Mary Constance Lloyd, and that a succession of art reference works had carelessly blended their two lives together – to create ’Mary Katharine Constance Lloyd’. I suppose it is a measure of how little importance is attached to the lives of such women artists that in 50 years no author had bothered to research either subject ab initio – but, when compiling a new biographical dictionary or making a footnote reference, had merely copied the – incorrect – information.

***

We are always up for some toad-related phenomena around here: Newly identified species of Tanzanian tree toad leapfrog the tadpole stage and give birth to toadlets. How about that.