In a special double-bill today, Gaw and Brit write in praise of a couple of bands you're probably heartily sick of by now... At this stage of the proceedings to ask you to pay some attention to a Christmas song is about as palatable a proposition as asking you to polish ... Read More...
About Author Profile: Bill
Here's a little more on a late-Victorian Christmas as experienced by the scholar-squire J. Arthur Gibbs, author of A Cotswold Village. J. Arthur has a strong sense of history, aware that he's encountering a way of country life that's rooted not just in place but also in time. Christmas and the ... Read More...
A Cotswold Village is one of my favourite books, mostly for sentimental reasons - I grew up in the Cotswolds - but also because it's a wonderful historical document that anyone interested in country life should enjoy. Written at the close of the 19th century, its author, J. Arthur Gibbs, ... Read More...
Channel 4's lavish production of William Boyd's Any Human Heart may have tempted you to buy the novel, though I would question why: it seemed to me to consist of just one damn thing after another, the pace being kept chugging along by a death every ten minutes or so. Despite ... Read More...
Diary of a Nobody is a fictional account of the daily life of Mr Charles Pooter, a middle-aged City of London clerk. It was written by George Grossmith and illustrated by his brother Weedon in the late-1880s and was originally serialised in Punch. It's available in book form, unused and unsullied, for ... Read More...
Further to my post last week concerning Russian drinking habits, I thought readers might be interested to read a handful of impressionistic sketches of the country and its people. They're drawn from my experiences studying, traveling and working in Russia during the 1990s. Whilst I found the place fascinating, I always ... Read More...
A Russian doctor takes the connoisseur's approach to combining vodka and food: Russian men drink vodka shots. They drink vodka with gusto while making loud breathing noises. They drink vodka as if their manhood depended on how loud those noises are. After these shots, Russians eat. They eat small morsels of food, ... Read More...
Mahlerman is supplementing my belated musical education, dispensed via his remarkable Lazy Sunday Afternoon posts, by slipping in the odd piece on cinema. Last Sunday he included the opening scenes from the 1999 French film, Beau Travail. There's plenty here to pique one's interest - the theme of male jealousy, the ... Read More...
I recently spent ten days in hospital. One of the non-medical consequences is that I'm now lavishly appreciative of my phone (by the way, the medical consequences were also positive). It's a smartphone that I acquired via an upgrade a couple of months ago. It entertained me beyond my wildest dreams. ... Read More...
The release of Aung San Suu Kyi provides a happy opportunity to plug one of the best autobiographies I've read, The Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe, available for a mere penny here. It's written in a vivid and fresh style and is full of arresting images and ... Read More...
