ADMIN: A timely note for readers of this blog.

I have been shamefully neglectful of this blog of late, but I do still keep an eye on the hit counts and other statistics for it. Not long ago, I was reviewing the specific lines of search text that led visitors to the blog…and I noticed a peculiar pattern. Instead of the usual queries with the name of a book or author, I came upon several queries that searched for phrases and even entire sentences from one or two of my reviews. The searched-for sentences had no strong relation to the book in question — they didn’t include a title or author, certainly — but they were word for word from my reviews. And most of these queries came within the span of a week or two.

How strange, I thought.

And then I thought a little more.

Are students plagiarising my book reviews in their final papers, and then being caught by their professors or teachers who track them down by Googling or using other search engines to locate suspicious strings of text from said papers and finding my blog and its book reviews in the search results?

If this is indeed the case, I have only two things to say:
(1) Students: The full citation information for my blog is here. Please do use it, along with quotation marks as appropriate, especially if you intend to pull certain uncommon turns of phrase or other text directly from my blog and insert it into the text. Your instructors are not stupid: if you know how to use search engines to find my blog, they almost certainly know how to use search engines to find out the source of your copied text.
(2) Teachers and professors: If you come upon my blog in your searching and discover your students plagiarising my book reviews, you have my full blessing to give them a zero for the paper or fail them from the course, or whatever punitive actions your administration permits.

This has happened for two academic semesters running; I will be very interested to see if it continues for a third. And to be truthful, I’m not actually angry. If anything, I’m rather proud to have been plagiarised — as long as the plagiarists are caught and punished appropriately.

A Brief Update

I haven’t abandoned this blog, though various other commitments have prevented me from writing more in-depth reviews of the books I have been reading. However, I’ve dusted things off long enough to tidy up my Publications list, which should now be fully updated with all of my current and forthcoming publications.

I hope to have more pertinent content soon. No firm promises on what sort of content it will be or when it will appear, but I do have quite a few books in the queue!

ADMIN: Diaries and Memoirs Collection Page

In an effort to keep myself organised, I’ve added a new page to this blog that contains information on my collection of British political diaries and memoirs. Most of them, clearly, are from elected politicians, but I also have an interest in writings by civil servants or diplomatic officials.

I’ve been building this collection for the past few years, trying to acquire good condition volumes and the occasional signed or first edition copy. Like most collections, it’s very much a work in progress. I do have limits on how much I am willing to spend on individual acquisitions — recently, I passed up an absolutely beautiful signed first edition of Jim Callaghan’s Time and Chance because the price was a little too dear. With a little luck and persistence, though, I hope to build a fine little library in which I can take pride.

ADMIN: Publications Page Now Available

A short administration post, just to mention that I’m in the process of compiling a list of publications as a separate page on To Bed With a Trollope. I’ve marked ones that are forthcoming and provided appropriate links to those already in print — some of which may require separate subscription access, particularly for journal articles and the like.

More book reviews will be coming this weekend and next week!

ADMIN: Citation Information

An examination of the site hits for this blog suggests to me that quite a few people have been using these reviews for research and reference purposes. This doesn’t bother me at all — it’s why I’m posting these reviews here, honestly. But in the interests of helping out fellow writers and researchers, I’ve separate page on my blog to provide citation information in several different formats.

It’s not easy to cite Web pages, but I have a fair idea of the kind of information that ought to be included to give full and proper credit. I don’t know if I will go so far as to link every single review post to that citation page, but I’m tempted to do so if it will help researchers determine appropriate citation methods (and prevent even a few cases of plagiarism).

Other useful free resources for citation information include Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab. Please do visit my citation page if you’re at all curious about how to cite individual reviews in my blog, and feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions for citation information at To Bed With A Trollope.

ADMIN: A Bit of Spring Cleaning

I’ve been doing some tweaking of site pages lately, and in the process I inadvertently stripped the About This Site and Current Reading List pages out of the sidebar. They’ve been restored, and a new page has been added — Research Notes, which will feature bits and pieces of files that I am currently using for my research projects. Most of these files will be password-protected, but if you leave a comment and ask for the password I’ll generally be more than willing to provide it by e-mail.

I haven’t done much in the way of updating lately, but now that a few of my current projects are starting to pick up speed, I ought to have a few more things to post about very soon. Many thanks to those who’ve come across my blog and started reading — I intend to build up momentum again in the very near future!

ADMIN: Start of November

So today begins a new month, and with it comes a shift in my review postings.

For a little more than two months now, I’ve been reposting reviews I wrote to a different blog quite a while back. Now that I’ve cleared out a good portion of those reviews, I am going to cut back on the postings — ideally to two or three per week, probably on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays. It’ll give me a chance to go back and rework some of my older, less-polished reviews and type up some new ones…and possibly also add some new and interesting content to my blog as well.

Many thanks for reading thus far!

Proper Introduction

Greetings, all! Welcome to ‘To Bed With a Trollope’, a blog dedicated primarily to book reviews and recommendations.

To forestall any questions about my choice of blog name, I should mention that it comes from a quip supposedly made by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. When a journalist asked him how he preferred to relax in his spare time, he mentioned that he liked to ‘go to bed with a Trollope’ — that is, a novel by the writer Anthony Trollope, known for his novels on the complexities of society and politics in Victorian Britain. (I’ve gone to bed with a few Trollopes myself, and if you like that sort of thing then they’re quite satisfying.)

I intend to start by going back through a series of book reviews I’ve been writing for the better part of three years now, and once I’ve caught up to where I happen to be on my Massive Pile of Books to Read, I’ll start posting my current reading material as well. Comments are of course appreciated — I’m quite interested to hear what other people might have to say about my reviews.

– SG

Introduction.

Content to follow, once I begin to copy and upload it.