Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
On St Patrick’s Day 2005 this piece appeared on the SAU Blog. It is somewhat in the spirit of my grumpy thoughts on book clubs from 2006 in the same…
Around the time I wrote this I was partial to insider accounts of film-making, and was favourably impressed with the sheer amount of time wasting this seemed to involve. I…
In a letter of 12 August 1977 to Robert Conquest, Kingsley Amis wrote: The Faber Book of Non-Trendy Verse has been easier and is going faster: a careful look through…
I had read somewhere that Robert Louis Stevenson had bequeathed his birthday (13th November) to a girl who was born on Christmas Day. Lately I came across Katherine Miller’s poem…
. As I have recently written, I am reading a collection of Allan Massie’s Life and Letters columns from the Spectator, which is full of shrewd judgments. In particular there…
I am running the risk of turning this blog into nothing but reposting of Adam deVille, but I could resist this 2013 post on cooking, feasting, joy, and the sacramental…
I have just begun reading Elizabeth Taylor’s At Mrs Lippincote’s (not, it feels obligatory to point out, not that Elizabeth Taylor. From Valerie Martin‘s introduction: Though I never met either…
It is hard to parody the overheated rhetoric of the luxury watch business’ merchandising arm. In his book Timekeepers, Simon Garfield has some very funny passages on the world of…
