Author Archive
August 8, 2025Why do we say “pardon my French” when we swear? Some say the expression comes from the time when our ruling class spoke French. A lofty Norman, snooty Plantagenet or...
June 20, 2025Many would proclaim a Radiohead-Shakespeare fusion a coming together of the two greatest miracles of consciousness. Others would roll their eyes. On Thursday 12 June,...
June 12, 2025Everyone has cracks; we hear that’s how the light gets in. Adeline Virginia Stephen wanted a life flooded with light. Marrying her husband, Leonard Woolf, in 1912, she said she...
June 10, 2025Tales of Cruising London: Sex on the Heath and Other Places, by James Hatcher. All Google searches led to Tales of Cruising London: Sex on the Heath and Other Places, by James...
May 26, 2025In middle age and closing in on national treasure status, Robert Macfarlane is as close to greatness and far from death as he has ever been. It’s a far cry from his perilous...
April 11, 2025Early in The Great Gatsby, a nightingale is spotted on the lawn outside the Buchanans’. There aren’t nightingales in America. Daisy calls it “romantic”...
March 28, 2025An out-of-work football manager has dropped a fresh batch of stone tablets and the House of Commons has found a workaround for Netflix’s password-sharing restrictions, so,...
March 14, 2025Gracie Abrams was three months old when the O2 Arena’s dome was opened to celebrate the new millennium. Back then, most of the 20,000 people who came to the O2 to see her...
January 21, 2025Tuesday will be seventy-five years since the death of George Orwell. Quite minor a date, but so massive a figure – patron saint of English decency, balletic navigator of...
