Jonathon Green reviews a new edition of a groundbreaking work of Anglo-Indian lexicography... Hobson Jobson A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive was published in 1886. Its name comes from an Englished pronunciation of ‘Ya Hassan! Ya Hossein!’ as cried at ... Read More...
Month: July 2013
The more Nige reads of Violet Trefusis, Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf in this excellent group biography, the more appalling they seem... The biography business - driven by modern research and documentation methods, publishers' demand for fat volumes, and the ever-grinding mills of Academe - does have a tendency to ... Read More...
How 'small' science can produce big thoughts. The internet is generally a wasteland of cat memes and political invective. Once in a while it serves its original purpose in disseminating new ideas. I stumbled across Boris Ryabko‘s little corner of the web while researching compression learning algorithms (which, BTW, are much ... Read More...
Weather determines mood and this has been a rare weekend of holiday heat, barbecues, paddling in rivers and British sporting dominance. And just as when in the bleak bowels of February we cannot imagine ever seeing summer again, cannot even remember the feel of the sun on a slightly burnt ... Read More...
What can we learn from a composer's very first work? Mahlerman investigates... Not the first work composed, but the first work published, the Opus 1 has held a peculiar fascination for musicians down the years. Sometimes the work (opus), even if penned by one of the great masters, is perfectly serviceable ... Read More...
In this week’s delve into the weirder recesses of Wikipedia, the Wikiworm presents for your delectation the dreadful scourge of the Scunthorpe Problem - no tittering at the back please. The Scunthorpe Problem occurs when a spam filter or search engine blocks e-mails or search results because their text contains a ... Read More...
Ruskin, as we discovered earlier this week, knew a thing or two about hawthorn blossom. But was he right about Tennyson's marshy punting? And what are Spiritual Boats? Frank investigates... In the poetry of Tennyson, boating has “a very marshy and punt-like character”. This is the view of John Ruskin, in ... Read More...
He was the bard of Chicago and he tried to steal Simone de Beauvoir from Satre... Mr Slang introduces the man behind The Man with the Golden Arm... As Hamlet put it, look here upon this picture. And see before you, dare I attest, a proper writer: specs, work-shirt, hair a little ... Read More...
Rita finds that her traditional English cynicism cannot survive a remarkable Independence Day performance... Parades, picnics, fireworks, and flags. Tomorrow is the great American national holiday celebrating a bunch of traitors to the Crown. Or as they are known over here, Patriots. During my early years in America I maintained a ... Read More...
Today we mark the death last weekend of a great Antipodean, Professor Kenneth Minogue - a provocative thinker whose critique of contemporary society should be better known. Funny how it’s the old Tories who have provided the most persuasive and nuanced critique of our recent and ongoing economic disasters. It's because, ... Read More...
