The Editors

From the beginning of the last chapter of The Mill on the Floss: In the counties higher up the Floss, the rains had been continuous, and the completion of the harvest had been arrested. And now, for the last two days, the rains on this lower course of the river had been incessant, so that the old men had shaken their heads and talked of sixty years ago, when the same sort of weather, happening about the equinox, brought on the great floods, which swept the bridge away, and reduced the town to great misery.

Doris Lessing in the LRB on 'unwritten novels', 11 January 1990: I first began to brood about unwritten novels in the late Fifties, after the Twentieth Congress. (Everyone over a certain age will know what I mean: youngsters, even the politically minded, ask, what was that?) I knew I had lived through an extraordinary time, but now it was over. What had ended was a political atmosphere – and this is always impossible to describe to later people, who are living in a different, equally compelling atmosphere, nearly always inimical to the first. (In the last few weeks we have seen a similar sudden change, one that no one foresaw, and the way we all thought so recently will rapidly seem improbable.

In his recent piece for the LRB on university privatisation, Stefan Collini mentioned that the UK Border Agency sees 'universities and colleges as an easy target in its efforts to cut immigration'. The ancient historian Josephine Quinn describes on her blog this week some of the often insurmountable hurdles facing academics from other countries invited to conferences in the UK. To get a visa, they have to 'demonstrate' they are not going to stay in the country, which means providing: full bank statements for the last six months with explanations of any unusual deposits; a letter from their bank confirming the balance and the date the account was opened; documentation of the origin of any money paid into the account; payslips for the last six months; recent tax returns; and evidence of income from any property or land, including property deeds, mortgage statements, tenancy agreements, land registration documents and crop receipts.

Stephen Sedley, Francis FitzGibbon and Joanna Biggs have written in the LRB about 'the radical changes currently being made to the legal aid system' and the government's proposals 'to undermine judicial review by starving claimants of legal aid on several fronts'.

From Zoë Heller's 1998 review of Bridget Jones' Diary (and two other novels in the same mould): Over the last ten years, in Britain and America, there has been a significant proliferation of a certain kind of feminine first-person narrative. The author is almost always a young(ish), single, middle-class woman, and the narrative a jaunty record of a frisky personal life... The feminine first-person narrative is unabashedly self-involved. It is knowing and urbane, but it is also showily neurotic and self-derogatory... Judging by the grim sameness of these three novels, the FFPN has already hardened into a new literary orthodoxy, a new correctness.