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Tag Archives: the Bible

Mary Curies

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

Review of Tracy Chevalier’s treatment of Mary Canning’s life, in Remarkable Creatures. — For Perspective

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged audiobooks, Bishop Usher, British Association for the Advancement of Science, Bullock's Egyptian Hall, Deshan Tennekoon, Dickens, Dissenters, Dorset, Elizabeth Philpot, fiction, film, Geological Society, history, International Women's Day, John Fowles, Lyme Regis, Mary Anning, men, Oxford University, palaeontology, Perspective, poverty, religion, Saxony, science | Comments (0)

NEWS AT A GLANCE

Monday, May 11, 2020

. One’s past is what one is. It is the only way by which people should be judged. — The Nelson Evening Mail, Wednesday, August 29 1906 . Globalisation is going into reverse. The (great) auk became extinct because he forgot how to fly. Your underpants contain cellulose. In the medieval period, walking through a labyrinth or […]

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also tagged Africa, aristocracy, auks, Australia, chemistry, clothing, crime, death, diamonds, Europe, fear, genealogy, globalisation, Greenland, Herodotus, history, hunting, Jeff Bezos, Jerusalem, keyboards, labyrinths, money, Nelson Evening Mail, poker, satire, the Koran, walking | Comments (0)

The Pelican

Saturday, April 25, 2020

Or; Some Further Notes Towards the Bestiary To the researches of the antiquary and scholar Jorge Luis ‘Vintage’ Borges, a few points offer further context on that most peripatetic of birds in this, our present century. . Learned reports come from South Asia, where the spotted-bill Filipino pelican (phillipensis) is found, with no small irony, only in Cambodia, the Indian peninsular, and in Sri Lanka (or the contemporary […]

Filed in Fictions | Also tagged America, animals, army, babies, basketball, Borges, British Library, Cambodia, Captain Scott, children, Colombo, Corpus Christi College, daughters, death, Egypt, employment, fables, food, Gartagena, General John Guise, Hebrew, hieroglyphs, Horapollo, India, Jesuits, John Grisham, Joseph Hall, King Lear, murder, oil, pelican, Post-modern Bestiary, psychology, Roald Dahl, Spain, Sri Lanka, St James's Palace, St James's Park, St Jerome, stupidity, The Spectator, Thomas Aquinas, US Supreme Court | Comments (0)

Peak fitness: a virtual expedition diary

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Climbing a mountain, lest I start climbing the walls In January, I promised a visiting Reservist mate that we’d climb Adam’s Peak. That plan was scotched when, days before he landed, I went down with dengue fever. But I’d done Adam’s Peak before (the first time, Christmas ’04, probably saved my life when the tsunami struck…), and […]

Filed in feature, Journalism | Also tagged Adam's Peak, Adidas, army, boredom, Buddhism, Christianity, cigars, coffee, Colombo, David Balfour, David Sharp, Everest, Fa-Hsien, Forrest Gump, health, Hinduism, Ibn Battuta, Islam, Marco Polo, meteorology, mosquitoes, mountaineering, music, Neighbours, podcasts, River Kwai, Sinhala, Spectator, Sri Lanka, stairs, Tamil, The Mahavamsa, the Matterhorn, The West Wing, Thomas Tallis, Zumba | Comments (1)

Selassie come home

Thursday, February 6, 2020

The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste Canongate, £16.99, pp. 428 . In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years before. Initially largely uncontested – thanks both to emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also tagged Abysinnia, Adwa, Andy McNab, Canongate, death, dragons, Ethiopia, fiction, gas, Haile Selassie, history, Homer, Italians, Maaza Mengiste, Mussolini, photography, sex, the Derg, The Spectator, Verdi, war, women, WW2 | Comments (0)

NEWS AT A GLANCE #1

Thursday, November 8, 2018

A lad named Rogers, and other true-ish stories. — For Queen Mob’s Tea House

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also tagged Alcoholics Anonymous, animals, assassins, babies, Beethoven, books, Caractacus, China, cricket, crime, Dhingra, Epping, Evelyn Waugh, fireworks, geography, health, heroes, horses, music, Nelson Evening Mail, news, Plutarch, pumpkins, Queen Mob's Tea House, race, Rain Men, Regulus, sailors, satire, shit, Sweden, taxes, the Congo, theatre, Tom McIlwaine, travel, TV | Comments (0)

Intelligence review

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

‘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 […]

Filed in Journalism, review | Also 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 Cold War, the KGB, the Medway, The Oldie, the Spanish Armada, University of Cambridge, Vasili Mitrokhin, Venice, war, Waterloo, WWII, Xenophon | Comments (0)

Sehr Gutenberg

Wednesday, May 16, 2018

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

Filed in correspondence, Journalism | Also 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 Göttingen Library, the internet, The Oldie, Umberto Eco, UNESCO, vellum | 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 […]

Filed in Journalism, NEWS AT A GLANCE | Also 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 Scots Guards, Tibetan, Tring | Comments (0)

Creation-ism

Wednesday, April 18, 2018

This weekend I will be joining a local choral society for their performance of Haydn’s The Creation – and what better way to welcome Spring now that it’s finally arrived. An avowed and much-loved masterpiece from its earliest performances – Vienna, 1798 – ‘whose appeal [I read from A Peter Brown’s DECCA sleeve-notes] was irresistible […]

Filed in correspondence, Journalism | Also tagged A Peter Brown, Aled Jones, army, bassoons, Beethoven, Chapel Royal, choral societies, Christianity, cosmology, cricket, DECCA, German, Germans, Hampton Court, Handel, Haydn, Italians, Kent, King James, Maidstone, Milton, music, Napoleon, oratorio, Oxford University, Poetry, religion, school, sheep, singing, Spring, the Church of England, the French, The Oldie, the Oxford Spezzati, tigers, Vienna, war, West Kensington, whales, worms | Comments (0)