Lincoln Allison on Belloc and the lost art of declamation
Looking for something else entirely, I come across this piece from 2005 on the Social Affairs Unit Blog by Lincoln Allison on Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Verses. Allison begins with a…
Category: commonplace book
“Swallows”, George Szirtes
George Szirtes is a poet who writes both children’s and grown-up verse. His book “How To Be A Tiger” neatly shows how ostensibly children’s verse can be as valuable as…
Meet the dung cannon, the cabbage parachute, the crystal brain , the mousepee pinkgill, the midnight disco, and the scurfy twiglet
All the above are fungi, as I have discovered from reading John Wright’s “The Naming of the Shrew: A Curious History of Latin Names” When I was a medical student I did…
Shrewstruck
From “The Naming of the Shrew: A Curious History of Latin Names” by John Wright It may sound extraordinary, but until recently the shrew had a most fearsome reputation.…
Nan Shepherd on going barehanded and barefooted
From “The Living Mountain”: The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. When I was a girl, a charming old gentlewoman said something to me that I have…
Trying to do too much – lessons from the Life Study, the Trappists and David Mamet
Here is a post on my other blog “A Medical Education” inspired by a passage in Helen Pearson’s “The Life Project”, which I reviewed in the TLS. An understandable tendency to…
The perils of double bluffs – Operation Ottrington
A while back I posted on the unintended consequences of too secret a secret codeword. Here’s a bit from Jonathan Gawne’s “Ghosts of the ETO: American Tactical Deception Units in the…
“silence is not sought for its own sake but, rather, for the space it makes.”
From The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise, Cardinal Robert Sarah and Nicolas Diat: Silence for us is a form of asceticism and a desire. Asceticism…
Séamus Sweeney 