Who invented the one partner for life rule? And why? If you’re of the old school, you may well have been happily married for decades… but for Kay (Meryl Streep) and Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones), things are a bit stale after 31 years together. Kay would like to spice up her ... Read More...
Month: September 2012
Nige’s book review the other day reminded me of an anecdote from Gerhardie’s childhood, recounted in his Memoirs of a Polyglot: My father, conceiving the idea that, in proportion to the collapse of his body, his mind had developed to the highest degree of mental acuteness, declared one day that he ... Read More...
Brit's claim to be 'on nodding terms with most of the monkeys' at Bristol Zoo provides Frank with a Proustian moment of recollection... For a long time, I used to go to bed early. Often, it was still light as I shut my bedroom door and drew the curtains and buried ... Read More...
We are programmed to trust a dictionary, but should we? Jonathon Green - the leading lexicographer of English slang - advises that dictionaries should carry a lexical health warning... Lexicography is about demystifying, of cutting out the fanciful crap and aiming for some kind of truth. This is usually done on ... Read More...
Nige is dazzled by the debut of a now largely forgotten author... William Gerhardie's Futility, published in 1922 (and available for 1p from Amazon), was a dazzling debut novel. Here's how it begins: And then it struck me that the only thing to do was to fit all this into a book. ... Read More...
Wine is the ultimate recession-proof leisure pursuit, argues Henry Jeffreys. Not least because it contains alchohol... A wine merchant opened up near my flat in East London about three years ago just as the recession was taking off and people were losing their jobs. They didn’t offer much below £10 a ... Read More...
The country house as shipwreck... The location of artworks around the world is a form of historical record. You could if you wished read the flows of trade and money and power and financial clout over the ages by studying the bills of sale of oil paintings, statuettes, antiquities, in much ... Read More...
Last month we've managed to get our paws on 10 copies of Jeanette Winterson's new horror novel, The Daylight Gate, exciting the critics with its dark re-imagining of the Pendle witch hunts... GOOD FRIDAY, 1612. Pendle Hill, Lancashire. A mysterious gathering of thirteen people is interrupted by local magistrate, Roger Nowell. Is this ... Read More...
The comedian Frankie Boyle is what the Americans would term an ‘asshole’. An unfunny, attention-seeking asshole. Lately he’s been trying to gain attention through offending people (sensitive disabled people, and hysterical politically-correct people) by making unfunny jokes about the Paralympics on Twitter. Sure enough, sensitive disabled people have been offended; ... Read More...
Mahlerman celebrates the Jewish contribution to the classical canon... What is the world's shortest book? Answer: The Book of Gentile Violinists. And it is quite true that if you made a list of the major fiddlers of the last 100 years, a very high proportion, perhaps more than 90%, would be Jews. ... Read More...
