Rainbow warriors

It's heartening to know that, despite the closure of the D H Lawrence Heritage Centre earlier this year amid the swingeing cuts to local government budgets, Nottingham's annual Festival of Culture celebrating the life, work and times of arguably the city's most prominent creative type is still going ahead. If it wasn't, it would have made a mockery of Nottingham's recent designation as a UNESCO City of Literature.

The programme of events kicked off last night with a lecture by Andrew Harrison, the knowledgeable and personable director of the University of Nottingham's D H Lawrence Research Centre, which once upon a time I called home. His topic was "The Rainbow, female experience and suffragism" - and so the lecture will have hopefully been enlightening for anyone who holds the mistaken (or at least grossly simplistic) but unfortunately common view that Lawrence was nothing but a misogynist.