“…I believe life is a continuum, and that no one really dies, they just drop their physical body and we'll all meet again, like the song says. It's sad but it's not devastating if you think like that. Otherwise I don't see how anybody could ever, once they see someone die, that they'd just disappear forever and that's what we're all bound to do. I'm sorry but it just doesn't make any sense, it's a continuum, and we're all going to be fine at the end of the story.”
Great photo of Paul and Matthew Sweet at the Botanical Gardens in Birmingham where they were introducing an outdoor screening of Withnail and I for the Flatpack Festival last Friday.
The drama series Bookish is scheduled to air its second season in August 2026.
The paperback edition of the novel Bookish will be released on June 18, 2026, and the hardcover and audiobook editions of Bookish Volume 2 will be released on August 27.
Bookish: a witty, warm-hearted mystery perfect for book lovers : Sweet, Matthew: Amazon.co.uk: Books
Buy Bookish Volume 2: a witty, warm-hearted mystery that's perfect for book lovers by Sweet, Matthew (ISBN: 9781529452334) from Amazon's Boo
Feel free to ignore this but If you're up for it, can yoi elaborate on the outrageous claims naomi woolf made about victorian Britain? I don't know who Woolf is, but the last bad Victorian take I heard was Lucy Worsley's "Victoria had so many children because Albert kept getting her pregnant as a way of sneakily making himself In Charge Of Everything because he resented not being King " and, well, I'm curious as to how bad we can get...
I'm pretty sure Vic and Bert couldn't keep their hands off each other, but as theories go, I would characterize that one as Unsubstantiated But Not Ipso Facto Implausible. The Wolf/Outrages thing is, imho, a different category entirely.
The thing is, Outrages, in all its factual inaccuracy, is exactly the kind of queer history Tumblr wants. The blurb says it "explores the history of state-sponsored censorship and violations of personal freedoms through the inspiring, forgotten history of one writer’s refusal to stay silenced." This allegedly forgotten history? John Addington "has his own Wikipedia page" Symonds. "Forgotten," here, of course means "she didn't personally learn about it in school," as it usually does on Tumblr.
Also she's wrong about her records because she didn't know what a 19th-century legal term meant and couldn't be bothered to look it up. This led to errors like presuming sentences of death were passed when they weren't. She also, notably, assumes all the relationships she's reading about were consensual (!). The glorious take-down interview, aired live on the BBC, is here:
Naomi Wolf discusses the criminalisation of love with presenter Matthew Sweet.
Best/worst line: "I don't think any of the executions you've identified here actually happened."
