My attention was recently drawn, as we say, to an early C20th composer, and I thought, that name sounds familiar, so I pottered off to look at my database of notes, and yes, they were hanging out in sex reform circles, interesting, no, especially as they seem generally to be described as 'reclusive' -

So anyway, I went to look up their entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and it is all about The Music (they were also apparently a top-level performer as well as prolific composer) and nothing about this other aspect.

And some while ago I perchanced to look up the ODNB entry for an early C20th lawyer whom I had come across in those same circles, and he was all about anti-censorship, and reforming the divorce laws (and we suspect also handling these sensitive matters for his mates in his professional capacity, no doubt) -

Very worthy.

He was also, I have come across indications in correspondence and biographies, rather a Not Safe In Taxis kinda guy, or at least, the handsy menace of the 1917 Club.

I don't actually know if there's a procedure for saying to editors of ODNB 'Hi, I have Further Info', let alone 'by the way, it's dishing the dirt'.

Was alerted to Zoom seminar I must have signed up for ages ago and not put into my diary, with link, approx 30 mins before it was due to happen.

Well, that was interesting and informative: 'Protest and Identity Formation in the Time of Covid: The UK in Historical Context', if ultimately rather grim.

Given that I am in the cohort that thinks the response of The Powers That Be was very much in the Day Late and a Dollar Short ballpark and marked by gross ineptitude even where corruption was not in play, I had not realised how much there was resistance based on the belief that it was an excuse for the imposition of The Iron Heel (and this crisscrossed a wide spectrum of beliefs).

And a lot of the evidence for that was actually not widely reported.

And one observes that there are doubtless differences between the overall picture and the impact of immediate local policing practices.

But looking at what one might consider the wider penumbra of the panic (the torching of 5G towers e.g.) I was reminded (I would be, wouldn't I) of some of the episodes in Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millenium, especially as the speaker invoked the Black Death as a comparison point for epidemic + social upheaval.

That the place I was very glad to leave in my youth is now The Top Place to Visit in the UK, though I think 'visit' may be the operative word there, after all back in my day the foreign language students and other summer visitors had an entirely different vision of it. Street foodstalls and trendy bars, not to mention galleries, Not In My Day, though we did have the walks in nature and seascape.

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(The person who asked about this could have found the info themself, it was really easy to find.) Stillbirths only had to be registered in England from 1927.

(This was the person who had found me as A Nexpert in a field I don't consider my main field of xpertise via Google AI. I was, in fact, able to provide quite a bit of information from the depths of Mi Knowinz. )

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How to decode the less than intuitive citations in footnotes to Gould and Pyle, Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine (1898 edition).

(Though I think the person asking the question to which this was actually the answer could possibly have given the matter a little thought and worked it out themself? Maybe not: maybe they have not had the years of dealing with Weird Citation Practices that are under my belt.)

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Still got it for telling people Where To Find Archives....