Kitty Hauser

Kitty Hauser is writing a book for Granta about the landscape archaeologist O.G.S. Crawford, to be called Bloody Old Britain. She is currently Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Between 1925 and the mid-1960s, H.V. Morton sold nearly three million copies of his travel books, from The Heart of London (1925) to A Traveller in Italy (1964). Most popular of all were his volumes on England, especially In Search of England, first published in 1927 and already in its 29th edition by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet...

Cute: style in Japan

Kitty Hauser, 15 April 2004

“Japanese ‘cute’ is a curious and very contemporary aesthetic, a style, a taste, an affectation: it denotes anything small, vulnerable and childlike that induces a feeling of pitiful love. There are cute expressions, cute gestures and cute ways of standing, with toes turned in. There are cute ways of dressing, too, especially for girls and young women: shoes with buckles, crinolined mini-skirts, mittens, toys worn as accessories, and the ubiquitous socks, some ankle-length, others longer and worn as if in the process of falling down, an effect achieved with special sock-glue.”

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