This summer Penguin Books are celebrating The Old Ways’ spirit of adventure with a competition aimed at finding and fostering a new generation of explorers and thinkers. We reviewed The Old Ways in Hardback last year and absolutely loved its lyrical description of the physical and spiritual pathways that we ... Read More...
Month: May 2013
Nige revisits Beckett's first novel - 'very Irish, very clever', and prefiguring the great works that came after.. His troubles had begun early. To go back no farther than the vagitus. It had not been the proper A of international concert pitch, with 435 double vibrations per second, but the double ... Read More...
Lost in reproduction: a tiny Venus meets a colossal Samson. I was recently in Frankfurt for a few hours and visited the Städel gallery, where I reacquainted myself with Lucas Cranach’s Venus (1532), the painting used as the poster image for the Royal Academy Cranach show of 2008. She is an unforgettable ... Read More...
Some of the most memorable films live on in our affections not just because they're beautifully shot or well acted or superbly scripted. Sometimes what really makes them stick in our memory is a song... The right sort of song - presented in the right way, in the right place, and ... Read More...
Coo, this is certainly whimsical - who could fail to be impressed by this tale of hi tech spy-pigeons? Pigeon photography is an aerial photography technique invented in 1907 by the German Julius Neubronner, who also used pigeons to deliver medications. A homing pigeon was fitted with an aluminium breast harness ... Read More...
Hooray, it's Eurovision Song Contest time again! Frank enthuses about the Irish and Montenegrin entries... Watching the first Eurovision Song Contest semi-final earlier this week, I was pleased to learn that the Irish contestant was accompanied to Malmö for the occasion by his priest. I learned other things, too, chief among them ... Read More...
If you're looking for a double entendre, Mr Slang is just the man to give you one... Those who, gazing at last week’s cab-referrent illustration, could tear their eyes from what Joyce, a connoisseur of such things, would have termed Judy Geeson’s ‘frillies’, would have noticed the strapline: ‘He gets more ... Read More...
This automated poetry-writing computer system is so good that most readers 'strongly prefer' its verses to those of Shakespeare. Or at any rate, that's what its creator claims. Jonathan Law investigates... On a bone-cold day in March the Wikiworm brought us some much needed cheer by digging out “The Bookseller/Diagram Prize ... Read More...
Machines are already better than humans at chess, and now computers are increasingly important in sports like cricket and baseball. Author Jon Hotten ponders the implications... Writing about the 1986 world championship match between Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov, Martin Amis said of chess: '[They are playing] the foremost game of ... Read More...
What’s the earliest age it is possible to develop a phobia? I ask because my younger daughter E, who is seventeen months old, has taken to seeing spiders everywhere. She will be playing happily enough when, suddenly spying some bit of fluff or black smudge on the floor, she will ... Read More...
