Science was surely never as much fun as it was in the 1790s, when Humphry Davy and various poets were experimenting with laughing gas at the Pneumatic Institute... Nitrous Oxide - 'laughing gas' - is in fashion again for recreational purposes, just as it was back in the 1790s, though it was ... Read More...
History
Continuing his mind-boggling tour of Phantom Libraries, Jonathan Law discovers that the books that Samuel Taylor Coleridge didn't write have a more powerful presence than the ones he did... Among the most tantalizing treasures of oblivion are the numerous phantom works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge – works promised to friends, family, ... Read More...
Death-sweats, Paddington spectacles and gallows humour this week, as Jonathon Green continues his slang tour of London with a trip to Tyburn... It is an old place. A crossroads where as we know wicked deeds assemble. It had a marker: Oswulf’s stone, seemingly pre-Roman and which may have been the meeting-place ... Read More...
Having reviewed comical imaginary libraries from Swift to The Sims, Jonathan Law turns to stranger, more dreamlike worlds, for 'large are the treasures of oblivion'... So far, this has been mostly for laughs. The libraries invented by Rabelais, Donne, Joyce, and Swift were all uproarious things, even where the humour seemed to be laced with something ... Read More...
Jonathon Green continues his eye-popping slang tour of London with a look at St Giles, once described as offering ‘the lowest conditions under which human life is possible’... The first time I saw the flaming mot, Was at the sign of the Porter Pot. I called for some purl, and we had it ... Read More...
Jonathan Law continues his exploration of that curious and very funny side-alley of literature: the library of non-existent books... Victorian literature has nothing to compare with the ribald, fantastical book lists of Rabelais, Swift, or Donne. And yet the era made its own singular contribution to the history of the phantom ... Read More...
Seventy years ago today the age of the atom bomb began with the Trinity Test and a gigantic mushroom cloud in the New Mexico desert. The man who led the Manhattan Project, Major General Leslie Groves, was an 'abrasive and sarcastic S.O.B'. But, writes Seamus Sweeney, he also produced what may be one of the best guides ... Read More...
Jonathan Law begins his exploration of that curiously enduring but little-discussed literary trope, the library of imaginary books... I knew it reminded me of something – that list of articles drummed out of Wikipedia for being too weird or dumb or just plain unhinged: in fact, a bunch of things I’ve read in ... Read More...
Is it a giant cormorant? A particularly vicious mosquito? Or something else? The Wikiworm consults this weird Wikipedia article to get to the truth behind the fantastical boobrie... The boobrie is a mythological shapeshifting entity inhabiting the lochs of the west coast of Scotland. It commonly adopts the appearance of a gigantic ... Read More...
Mr Slang raises a fourth glass of port to the famous Loamshire regiment, heroes of innumerable imaginary battles... ‘All that remains is the orderly –sergeant’s voice reading orders to the new blood in the quiet summer evening in sleepy Loamshire, with its laughing English fields and gay hedgerows spread about the ... Read More...
