In his series of WW1 epitaphs, Rudyard Kipling comments on the all too common fate of a new soldier at the front who – curious about the enemy – cannot resist taking a look and unwittingly exposes his head to a sniper. The beginner On the first hour of my first day In the front trench I fell.…
I did, in the first weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from ‘evacuees’.– Evelyn Waugh in a preface to Put Out More Flags complaining about evacuees much as he might have done about gout or rising damp. Evelyn Waugh is often at his most entertaining when he is at his most disagreeable. Reading Waugh – and…
All our stories begin before we are born. Not Just the blue eyes or flat feet we inherit, but the stories we hear from uncles and aunts, from grandmothers and grandfathers. Even if oral history is no more reliable than the party game of Chinese whispers, everyone bringing to it their own subjective lumber of myths, half-truths, fancies and deceits,…
It’s always fun when a tiresome book about the rules of the English language gets debunked and when some clever clogs points out that the prose of said tiresome tome is full of the very errors it decries. So it was with Lynn Truss’s bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation The book is this month’s…
“I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” – Gertrude Abercrombie After Pied Piper and The Thinking, my explorations led me into the byways of British literature of WW2 evacuation and evacuees. On that journey, I made – and continue to make – discoveries: Writers and…
There was a period in the early 1960s when my parents had a television (in those days you rented) and one of the programs I liked to watch was All Our Yesterdays produced by Granada Television. It was a look back in time based on the newsreel footage of that week twenty-five years ago – a week-by-week journey through the…
1943 I think about Morandi painting on top of a hill surrounded by fascism, I think about Picabia finding inspiration in soft-porn magazines on the Côte d’Azur, I think about Marinetti returning sick from the Russian Front, I think about Duchamp playing chess in his New York apartment, I think about Ronald Searle POW in the Kwai jungle, I think…
P.G.Wodehouse and A.A. Milne were the same age and in 1941 they were both close to 60. As young men about town in Edwardian London they had moved in the same social and literary circles, belonged to the same club and played on the same cricket team. They were friends. Bertie Wooster and Christopher Robin are of course fictional characters…
“Phosphorescence is a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. … When the stored energy becomes locked in by the spin of the atomic electrons, a triplet state can occur, slowing the emission of light, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.” Phosphorescence is also the title of a book by…
Long before everyone aspired to be a gourmet chef and cooking programs were all the rage, it wasn’t so easy to get good advice about what to cook and how to do it. Of course, the posh papers had their Sunday supplements with glossy accounts of exotic meals first tasted in far-off places like Mykonos, Sicily, and the South of…
In Hamelin in Lower Saxony. there’s an inscription on a wooden beam on the side of the Rattenfangerhaus (rat catcher’s house). An English translation on the plaque reads: In the year 1284 on the Day of John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were led away by a piper dressed in many-coloured clothes to Calvary…
One book leads to another. Six Degrees of Separation comes via Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Readers start with the same book and see where their connections take them by the first Saturday of the month. The starting point for January 2021 is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020). Follow the hashtag #6degrees on Twitter to check out…
As is ever the case, I found these images on the IWM site while actually looking for something else. They just seemed to have a little relevance today given the frothing of the anti-vaxxer minority. Apparently, Dr. Fauci has claimed he went to the North Pole personally to vaccinate Santa Claus against COVID-19. I don’t know whether Santa received immunization…
It’s that time of the month – #6degrees again. Read about it here and join in. Play the animation and the book chain will appear! Our start point is Judy Blume. Her Are you there God? It’s Me Margaret (1970) was a bit of a sensation in the children’s lit world because it shockingly dared to mention the unmentionable (menstruation!…
Because I wrote a piece about starting a school I began thinking about school missions. Mostly about how alike they are and how so often completely hollow when you take a look at what really drives the school in question. And then I thought back to all the hours over the years that I have sat with earnest, caring, dedicated…