A S H Smyth

Category Archives: Journalism

Up diddly up, down diddly down

Wednesday, September 12, 2018

Itchin’ for a Twitch Inn, at the Heritage weekend. — For The Oldie

Also filed in correspondence | Tagged Battle of Britain, Douces Manor, Dunkirk, fine dining, Germans, graffiti, Guy Gibson, Heritage Open Days, Idi Amin, John Cunningham, Kent, Maidstone, North Downs, Peter Townsend, pubs, RAF, Tesco, The Beatles, The Dambusters, The Malling Society, The Oldie, Twitch Inn, West Malling, WW1, WW2 | Comments (0)

Brue meets gel

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

About the Bruegels on my bedroom wall. — For The Oldie

Also filed in correspondence | Tagged AA Gill, anatomy, art, Athena International, Bath, Brussels, Carmina Burana, chickens, childhood, death, Don DeLillo, drawing, drink, etching, Flanders, Fleet Foxes, gambling, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, Jürgen Müller, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Nabokov, painting, peasantry, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Bruegel the Younger, pissing, religion, TASCHEN, the Duke of Alba, the Habsburgs, The Holburne Museum, The Oldie, the Spanish Inquisition, the tower of Babel, Thomas Schauerte, Tom Frantzen, Vienna, war, weddings, WH Auden | Comments (0)

‘For centuries before the Second World War, educated British people knew far more about intelligence operations recorded in the Bible than they did about the role of intelligence at any moment in their own history.’ Nowadays, one might think, few would even know that. But that’s where Christopher Andrew – Emeritus Professor of Modern and […]

Also filed in review | Tagged Afghanistan, Allen Lane, America, Ancient Egypt, army, Bletchley Park, Cardinal Richelieu, China, Christianity, Christopher Andrew, Christopher Marlowe, CIA, Clausewitz, Elizabeth I, Francis Walsingham, history, Holland, India, Islam, Israel, Ivan the Terrible, Julius Caesar, MI5, MI6, Napoleon, non-fiction, Pearl Harbour, Russia, spies, Stalin, Sun Tzu, the Bible, the Cold War, the KGB, the Medway, The Oldie, the Spanish Armada, University of Cambridge, Vasili Mitrokhin, Venice, war, Waterloo, WWII, Xenophon | Comments (0)

Litterary death match

Thursday, June 21, 2018

In the Autumn of 2014, feeling somewhat down about his wordsmithing career, uncertain in his role as model for his two sons, and with one eye on the health of his own father, Toby Litt decided to take on the oft-postponed biography of great-great-great-grandfather William. An undefeated prize-fighter and winner of 200 belts in the […]

Also filed in review | Tagged Galley Beggar Press, The Oldie, Toby Litt | Comments (0)

M.O.’s m.o. – or; Everybody wants to be like Mike

Thursday, June 7, 2018

A review of Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. — For The Spectator

Also filed in review | Tagged crime, ethnography, fiction, Florence, geography, intelligence, Libya, London, memory, Michael Ondaatje, spies. Aramaic, St Lucia, The Spectator, the Thames, Trieste, writers, writing, WW2 | Comments (0)

Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy Bluffer’s Guide

Monday, June 4, 2018

Last weekend I played host to a particularly friendly cricket match – by which I mean that both teams had no clue what they were doing. The opposition, Rain Men, were captained by my friend and usual team-mate Simon, whose excuse was that he’d only played the game 263 times previously. The other captain was, […]

Also filed in review | Tagged beer, Bluffer's Guides, Boris Starling, Brexit, cats, conversation, cricket, cycling, Duckworth Lewis, Englishmen, etiquette, fishing, footnotes, Fuller Pilch, girlfriends, golf, Harry Eyres, Haynes Publishing, humour, James Trollope, Jonathan Goodall, Keith Hann, leadership, management, Marcus Berkmann, Mike Brearley, Nick Yapp, opera, Rain Men, Samuel Johnson, Serbo-Croat, social media, South Africans, Susie Boniface, Test Match Special, The Oldie, Town Malling, William Hanson, wine, wisdom | Comments (0)

Monty’s trouble

Monday, May 28, 2018

A footsoldier’s review of Antony Beevor’s Arnhem: the Battle for the Bridges, 1944. — For The Oldie

Also filed in review | Tagged 1st Airborne Division, Allied Expeditionary Force, Antony Beevor, army, Arnhem, books, Britishness, engineering, Field Marshal Montgomery, Flanders, General Bradley, General Eisenhower, General Patton, Germans, history, Holland, Nijmegen, non-fiction, Operation Market Garden, paratroopers, Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld, the Dutch, The Oldie, the Schutzstaffel, the Wehrmacht, WW2 | Comments (0)

Sehr Gutenberg

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

On movable type, the Internet, and almost every damn thing in between. — For The Oldie

Also filed in correspondence | Tagged blogging, books, Germany, Gutenberg, information, Latin, Mainz, marginalia, monks, movable type, printing, Project Gutenberg, publishing, religion, scriptoria, Sellar and Yeatman, Stephan Füssel, TASCHEN, technology, the Bible, the Göttingen Library, the internet, The Oldie, Umberto Eco, UNESCO, vellum | Comments (0)

Spies like us?

Tuesday, May 8, 2018

A less-than-Smiley response to John le Carré. — For The Oldie

Also filed in correspondence | Tagged books, George Smiley, John le Carré, lexicons, London, maps, memoir, MI5, MI6, Penguin, spies, The Oldie, walking | Comments (0)

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Monday, April 30, 2018

. Norway has five leper hospitals, with about 600 patients. — The Nelson Evening Mail, January 24 1907 . There is an injury called ‘tennis elbow of the heel’. The rocks in the Sultanate of Oman are special. Hitler only started all the Nazi bollocks because he was such a godawful painter. There is no necessary connection between […]

Also filed in NEWS AT A GLANCE | Tagged Adolf Hitler, America, birds, boxing, codicology, crime, death, dogs, Edwin RIst, finance, Francis Urquhart, geology, health, history, leprosy, London International Palaeography Summer School, manuscripts, mountaineering, Natural History Museum, Nazism, Nelson Evening Mail, Norway, Oman, painting, palaeography, phones, Poetry, poets, policing, pudding, Samaritans, Stephen Merchant, tennis, the Bible, the Scots Guards, Tibetan, Tring | Comments (0)

Category Archives: Journalism

Up diddly up, down diddly down

Brue meets gel

Intelligence review

Litterary death match

M.O.’s m.o. – or; Everybody wants to be like Mike

Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy Bluffer’s Guide

Monty’s trouble

Sehr Gutenberg

Spies like us?

NEWS AT A GLANCE

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