Thanks to our friends at Pan Macmillan, we've got two signed first edition copies of Man Booker longlist nominee Almost English to give away. Join our free Book Club for your chance to win... Almost English is the fourth novel by Somerset Maugham Award-winner Charlotte Mendelson, and it has been nominated ... Read More...
Month: August 2013
More compelling machines (previous ones in the series are here). Today Scott Locklin digs up some Cold War flying dinosaurs. Are they the most fascinating mechanical objects ever built? The Soviets solved problems differently from the West. This wasn’t just because they had different problems to solve, though there is that. Part ... Read More...
Speak, memory! It is a late afternoon in late summer in Southsea, and a ten-year old boy is in the hallway on hands and knees refereeing a tight football match between two teams of miscellaneous action figurines. An easy sunlight flows through the window in the kitchen where his father ... Read More...
With two thirds of the planet covered by water, is it any surprise that the churning mightiness of the seas and oceans has influenced artists, writers and musicians so profoundly?... Homer acknowledged that there was '...nothing so dire as the sea' and, more recently, the great Philip Roth intoned on the ... Read More...
A semi-spooky, semi-sweet delve into the weirdest of wikipedia articles today introduces us to some rather unanimated portrait sitters, who all sort of remind me of the titular star of 80's film 'Weekend at Bernie's'. Post-mortem photography is the mostly out-of-use practice of photographing the recently deceased. The invention of the daguerrotype in 1839 ... Read More...
Frank discovers surrealism and a world forever going to pot in Radio 4's early morning farming programme... Every weekday morning for the past three months, I have been leaping out of bed extremely early and cutting two or three brisk Boswellian capers around the room. This is to ensure that I ... Read More...
Even crème fraîche can be described as 'edgy' these days - has the term lost all meaning?... Words have to multi-task. It comes with their territory. One dictionary entry, several, even many definitions; some nuanced others seemingly oppositional though there, perhaps, one may have a homonym. The bulk of slang is ... Read More...
