This week's acquisitions

* The Reform'd Coquet, Familiar Letters Betwixt a Gentleman and a Lady, and The Accomplished Rake, Mary Davys, Martha F. Bowden, ed, University of Kentucky Press, 1999 - a purchase inspired by a seminar paper on the novelist, briefly discussed here

* 'Almost a Man of Genius', Clemence Royer, Feminism and Nineteenth-Century Science, Joy Harvey, Rutgers Uni Press, 1997, about a "thinker who wrote extensively on science, philosophy, feminism and their interaction, for both specialist and popular audiences ... [on gender and science] most notably in connectionwith the widely debated implications of Darwin's theory of evolution for man and woman's place in both nature and society".

* Diary of Mrs Kitty Trevylyan "A story of the times of Whitefield And the Wesleys. By the Author of "Chronicles of the Schönberg-Cotta Family", London, T Nelson and Sons, 1866. (Ebay impulse purchase)

* Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Atlantic, London, 2004

*Christianity: A Global History, David Chidester, Penguin 2001. (Ordered when I held out hopes of a small part-time OU tutoring job, which don't look like being realised.)

* Writing Machines, N. Katherine Hayles, MIT Press, 2002: Hayles is one of those people who after you've read a couple of paragraphs you realise they are genuinely original, brilliant figures - I leant heavily on her in my thesis (posted on my website).