A round-up of the bizarre and brilliant of the web corralled by the University of Portsmouth Library.
Happy World Book Day! Explore five books from around the world that will take you on a journey from the artworks of feudal Japan to the mysteries of philosophy and from the worldview of a man in self-imposed social exile to a fantastical parody of pre-war Soviet society and a poignant view of the arrival of British colonialism in Africa told from an African perspective.
Our local police force has shared their latest crime prevention update with us again. This time, the focus is on fraud in all its many forms.
Losing yourself in a book can have a profound impact on body and mind, akin to entering an altered state of consciousness. The effect is rapid, too. After reading for just six minutes, the average person’s stress levels fall by two-thirds as the mind is taken away from its habitual thoughts and the body relaxes. Reading works can relax you even faster than listening to music.
Celebrate World Book Day by going on a blind date with a book. All this week in the Library, you can borrow up one of our specially wrapped hand-picked books from the trolley in the Atrium and discover something you might not otherwise have ever read. Where might your date take you?
This delightful lino print, the artist’s proof, is a much appreciated donation to the University’s art collection by printmaker and MA Illustration student Mark Howard Jones is a printmaker. It forms part of his “Cut Loose” printmaking journey.
In celebration of World Book Day on Thursday 7 March 2024, we would like you to share your favourite books of all time. Let us know which books have moved you and what you like about them or why they excited, engaged, moved or changed you and like books posted by others and we will try to buy the most popular for our library collection so that others can enjoy the books you love most.
As LGBTQIA+ History Month draws to an end, it is time to look at the state of affairs as they stand now and ask how far have we actually come and what else should we do?
The catalogue for a new special collection relating to the author, sculptor and academic Professor Rom Landau (1899-1974) is now available on the University Library website.
On 28 June 1969, police raided a gay club in Greenwich Village, New York. Not an unsurprising event – it was still illegal for men to dance together in a nightclub, let alone have consensual sexual relationships, and “masquerading” as the opposite sex, for example, as a drag queen, was also a crime. A club such as Stonewall, which was attended mostly by Black and Latinx men and drag queens, was somewhere the police expected to close down without incident. Instead, the anger of the racially and sexually oppressed erupted into a riot, in turn spawning further riots and protests across the city. The riots focused national attention on the social injustice faced by homosexuals in America and sparked the conversation about tolerance and equality that has seen so much change until today.
Most people are brought up to believe there are two genders, male and female, that are separate and distinct. This is the basis of our understanding of sexual diversity – people are seen either to be attracted to people of the ‘same sex’ or the ‘opposite sex’. Life would be much simpler were this actually so…
