Hairy Relief

In these orchestra slashing (poor beleagured CBC radio orchestra), and writer shafting times, it’s rare enough to find a moment of advantage (once you don’t include obvious improvements in cholera, polio, public hanging etc) but today I chanced upon an advantaged moment to being a writer in this century, at this most inhospitable of writerly times …

“A hairy face was required of writers in the mid nineteenth century…”

From Claire Tomalin’s Thomas Hardy The Time-Torn Man. (p92 Penguin).

I have been reading Tomalin’s very enjoyable biography of Hardy in tandem with an equally intriguing history of Iraqi football. Perhaps an unusual pairing, but I wonder of other such pairings, where folks read distinctly different books at that same time.

Post your pairings.