In which Luke Honey of The Greasy Spoon revisits a West London institution redolent of the swinging sixties... Hands up who remembers The Gasworks? Twenty odd years ago, I started my glamorous career in the so-called Art World - as a porter at a well-known auctioneers to be found in the ... Read More...
Oddities
Commenting on Frank Key's bedtime story about the glib hatter, Adelephant recommended the story of The Hobyahs as suitable follow-up reading matter. This remarkable folk story was collected in Joseph Jacobs' 1890 work 'English Fairy Tales'. I offer no analysis or comment - it really does speak for itself... Once there was ... Read More...
Steerforth discovers a once-popular but now largely forgotten thriller writer with a unique way with words... The truth is that even the most experienced and well-qualified second-hand booksellers know bugger all about most of the titles that we sell. Much of the time, we are not selling Eliot (George or T. ... Read More...
What everyone from Hippocrates to Shakespeare said about swoons, shudders, convulsions and dread... Hargrave Jennings (c.1817-1890) was an English Rosicrucian, occultist, and writer on comparative religion, whose day job was acting as secretary to an opera manager called Colonel Mapleson. Among his works were Sermons From The Styx (1886), puportedly a ... Read More...
I'm glad that these day we can use Wikipedia to look up the answers to our questions, rather than having to roast a few cats... Taghairm, sometimes interpreted as "spiritual echo," or calling up the dead, was an ancient Scottish mode of divination. The definition of what was required varied, but may have included an animal sacrifice and ... Read More...
Some sound advice for our younger readers today, as Steerforth discovers a 1950s sex guide for boys... Not long ago I found a very instructive book called On Becoming a Man - A Book for Teen-Age Boys by Harold Shryock, M.A., M.D., a teacher at the University of Loma Linda in California. Published in ... Read More...
One of Britain's hard-working civil servants features in today's unusual article culled from the stranger side of Wikipedia The Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office is the title of the official resident cat of the UK Prime at 10 Downing Street. Only two cats, Humphrey and Larry, have been given the title officially; other cats were given ... Read More...
This week Frank's cupboard contains some essential equipment for the Victorian camping enthusiast... For convenience the following list is inserted here. It is condensed from a number of notes made for trips of all sorts, except boating and horseback-riding. It is by no means exhaustive... Be careful not to be led ... Read More...
It's Barbara Cartland's birthday! Nige celebrates Britain's most multi-'talented' Dame.... Had she not been cruelly plucked from us at the age of 98, Dame Barbara Cartland - socialite, celebrity, figure of fun, self-appointed expert on many things, tireless self-publicist and staggeringly prolific romantic novelist - would have been 113 today. She ... Read More...
Stephen gives us two rather wonderful anecdotes... I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that Ludwig Wittgenstein admired Samuel Johnson. Perhaps I should not have been surprised: both of them sought -- to use one of Wittgenstein's characteristic words -- "clarity," and both of them abhorred -- to use one of Johnson's characteristic words -- ... Read More...
