Thomas Hardy, as a young man, was tasked with a job that was extraordinarily well matched to his morbidly repining tendencies. Whilst working as a trainee architect in London, he'd overseen the disinterment and removal of bodies from St Pancras Churchyard. A plaque commemorates his task: During the 1860s the Midland ... Read More...

A cream bun to Jonathan Law this week, but well done also to Ian Russell, Worm and newcomer Grant who also twigged the answer by the looks of it. Click continue for the full answer. 9195 ... Read More...

Here's this week's devilishly fiendish Round Blogworld Quiz question (see the previous ones and their solutions here). As usual, find the link between these cryptic clues. A point for each item you get, and an imaginary cream bun of regal proportions if you get them all. If you get the ... Read More...

Following his look at Edwardian football hooligans, James Hamilton continues his latest Row Z series on the reality of vintage soccer by turning to the violence and bad behaviour on the pitch... Two things get in the way of many otherwise decent attempts to write football history. Cloying nostalgia, that polyfillas ... Read More...

Continuing our series looking at great paintings housed in London's National Gallery... I took my youngest son to the National Gallery last week. As we stood before Stubbs's Whistlejacket I asked him what he thought: "It's a bit scary, Daddy". I could see his point. Stubbs's series of paintings depicting a horse being ... Read More...

My friend Mick Wall turned me on to Filth. Reading that sentence back I see that there are a few ambiguities in it, admittedly, but those aside, he did. ‘Have you read Filth?’ he asked one day when Irvine Welsh’s name came up. I hadn’t, but because Mick has rarely ... Read More...

What is music? What is it for? And what does it do, if anything? Was Heine close when he suggested that 'where words leave off, music begins'? Or was Stravinsky on the money when he pronounced that music was 'powerless to express anything at all' and that composers 'combine notes, ... Read More...

London Fashion Week seems positively staid compared with some of the events going on in our capital city. Last night I read about the nude ‘burlesque’ performances attended by Prince Harry and other well known public figures at a controversial new club in Soho. I also heard that the choreographers ... Read More...

Peter Kosminsky’s four-part drama The Promise reached the half-way mark on Sunday (if you missed them, you can watch the first two episodes on Channel 4 OD). Eight years in the making and filmed entirely in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (not the easiest places to work), each episode is ... Read More...

Some, like Mozart or Sid Waddell, are born as geniuses. Others have genius thrust upon them, in the form of a single brilliant, radical idea. And the very best sort of brilliant, radical idea is the one that appears so obvious that it’s hard to believe that nobody had thought ... Read More...