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THE ACCUMULATED MASS OF RAILWAY LITERATURE in the form of books, periodicals, papers to learned Institutions, Parliamentary papers, and so on, has grown to gigantic proportions in recent years, and today as our own British railway system is shrinking the volume of that literature is increasing in inverse proportion to the shrinkage. That is only reasonable because much of the history of railways, not only of this country but of the world, has not yet been adequately documented, and if the railway is, as well it might, almost wholly surpassed by road and air transport, the omission must be repaired as soon as possible, if only to leave for posterity a record of a phase in the life of Man: and it must be done before any more valuable material is disposed of as salvage.

PETER MARK ROGET died on 12 September 1869, Nevertheless, he is more widely known today than he ever was in his heyday. His name has endured a full century, and may indeed endure for ever, primarily because of the great popularity, extraordinary sale, and unforgettable title of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases. This astonishing collection of interchangeable parts of speech, ‘classified and arranged … so as to facilitate the expression of ideas and assist in literary composition’, was first published in 1852, long after Roget had retired from medical practice and shortly after he had given up his post as secretary of the Royal Society. He was already 73 years old, but since he could not slacken his habitual pace, he continued to work unceasingly on revision after revision until there were twenty‐eight revisions when he died seventeen years later. After his death, his son, John Lewis Roget, edited the Thesaurus until 1908; a grandson, Samuel Romilly Roget, then took over the editorship and retained control over the legacy until 1936.

LOST CAUSES.—They find a home in Oxford, we are told: “lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties.” Every bookcase is haunted by some antic ghost, which peers fleetingly from your friend's shoulder as he talks of literature, and cannot be exorcised by aspersions of laughter. Here sits a phantom Galsworthy, toying with a gold albert; there flit the twin spirits of Mrs. Woolf and Miss Sackville‐West, and “like smoke vanish away, twittering”; my own room is beset, as you see, by the sober shade of Arnold; and the banshee shriek of Shaw is still loud in the land. These survivals have a piquant inconsistency, and we take a perverse pride, like Pater's Marius, in murmuring old rites and feeding the hoary Lar which drags its slow colubrine length about our hearth But not every author becomes a private deity. Millions now living are already dead: often, indeed, they themselves make it difficult to diagnose the continuance of life.

JUST over a hundred years ago began what was truly described as the “slaughter” of the hoards of books collected by Richard Heber, whom Thomas Campbell called “the fiercest and strongest of the bibliomaniacs.” The thousands and thousands of volumes were treated by Heber's executors simply as property to be promptly turned into cash in the auction‐room so that the estate could be wound up. They were dumped on the market and, naturally, prices slumped.

It is now fashionable to suggest that the Celtic regions of the United Kingdom are the internal colonies of the central English state and that they have been, particularly since the rapid industrialization of the nineteenth century, subject to a penetrating anglicization of their culture and institutions. In terms of the internal colonialism thesis, it can be argued that the cultural nationalism of Scotland which was developed in the nineteenth century was an attempt to maintain the distinctiveness of civil society in Scotland in the context of massive regional economic imbalance. The Scottish intelligentsia, dominated by Edinburgh lawyers and Presbyterian ministers, can thus be compared with the intelligentsia of Third World societies undergoing a process of de‐colonization where separate cultural identities have to be preserved or, if necessary, constructed.

This aim of this paper is to examine the existing gender digital inclusion evaluation guidance and proposes future research recommendations for their evaluation. Despite modern progress in towards gender equality and women’s empowerment movements, women’s access to, use of and benefits from digital technologies remain limited owing to economic, social and cultural obstacles. Addressing the existing gender digital divide is critical in the global efforts towards the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In recent years, there has been a global increase of gender digital inclusion programmes for girls and women; these programmes serve as a mechanism to learn about gender-specific digital needs and inform future digital inclusion efforts. Evaluation reports of gender digital inclusion programmes can produce critical insights into girls’ and women’s learning needs and aspirations, including what works and what does not when engaging girls and women in information and communications technologies. While there are many accounts highlighting the importance of why gender digital inclusion programmes are important, there is limited knowledge on how to evaluate their impact.

The thematic analysis suggests three points to consider for the gender digital inclusion programmes evaluation: context-specific understanding of gender digital inclusion programmes; transparency and accountability of the evaluation process and its results; and tensions between evaluation targets and empowerment of evaluation participants.

The thematic analysis suggests three points of future focus for this evaluation process: context-specific understanding of gender digital inclusion programmes; transparency and accountability of the evaluation process and its results; and tensions between evaluation targets and empowerment of evaluation participants.

The authors propose recommendations for gender digital inclusion evaluation practice and areas for future research.