Category: t
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Click image to enlarge. | Picture taken on Tuesday 28 December 2010 | Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-on-Avon Good frend for Jesus sake forebeare, To digg the dust encloased heare; Bleste be the man that spares thes stones, And curst be…
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[Click the images to enlarge.] From Issue 1 [Link] From Issue 1 [Link] From Issue 1 [Read the entire poem] From Issue 2 [Read the entire poem] From Issue 3 [Read the entire poem] From Issue 9 [Read the entire…
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Last December, we went to see Alan Bennett’s new play, The Habit of Art, which is about an imaginary meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten (this is in a way similar to Adam Fould’s novel The Quickening Maze, which…
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Namesby Wendy Cope She was Eliza for a few weeksWhen she was a baby —Eliza Lily. Soon it changed to Lil. Later she was Miss Steward in the baker’s shopAnd then ‘my love’, ‘my darling’, Mother. Widowed at thirty, she…
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Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1987) answers: Of all the civilizations of premodern times, none appeared more advanced, none felt more superior, than that of China. Its considerable population, 100-130 million compared with Europe’s…
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According to Nicholas Ostler in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): The online communities that use languages other than English have grown meteorically in the first decade of the twenty-first century. From 2000 to 2009,…
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On Tuesday, we went to see Alan Ayckbourn‘s Season’s Greetings at the National Theatre. Jeff lined up early in the morning to take advantage of the NT’s day ticket policy.1 They hold back a number of tickets to sell on the day,…
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“Champaign and cinnamon candle”. Photo courtesy of E & S On Christmas Eve, two friends visited us and we spent a joyous afternoon and evening together, eating, drinking, chatting and playing games. Happy times. The picture above was taken by them. May all our…
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Nicholas Ostler answers in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): The decline of English, when it begins, will not seem of great moment.International English is a lingua franca, and by its nature, a lingua franca…
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Nicholas Ostler answers in The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel (2010): Chinese, like all the great languages of the modern world excepting English and French, remains very much a localized language in eastern and southeastern Asia,…
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Learn more here.–
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– “Truth is in my heart, and in my breast there is neither craft nor guile. — The Egyptian Book of the Dead. –Today we went to the British Museum to see the Journey through the afterlife: ancient Egyptian Book of the…
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WHAT DID YOU WRITE ME? –by Reid Mitchell Fearing poisonI hired an official tasterto read my email. He hung himself today.
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– I am very happy to say that Nick Admussen’s first chapbook Movie Plots has been published by Epiphany Editions in New York. Movie Plots is “a series of disorientingly absorbing prose poems that take thirty different film genres as points of departure for riffs…
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Picture courtesy of JP. WRITTEN IN SNOW –by t We extinguished two glasses of port,drained the lamp,transfigured from dressed to undressed. Both…
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On 2nd December, 2009, I posted these Banksy images on my previous blog: Responses: [Click image to enlarge] Recently, I watched Exit Through the Gift Shop. It’s a reasonably enjoyable film, and one of the highlights, for me, is this counterfeited tenner: –
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This post was originally written on 15th February, 2009. 妹妹說我的頭像雞蛋 My favourite scarf is long, long enough to be an afternoon blanket for two babies, and the remaining length draping all over the floor. I only wear it when I…
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I love this picture taken by the graphomaniac bookworm; it is so serene, so mysterious. “Some street in Belfast. I don’t know the name. I just know that it was during the Easter break, in 2004, and that I was…
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Aaron Johnson is handsome (and young!). We watched Sam Taylor-Wood’s Nowhere Boy, a film about the young John Lennon, played rather convincingly, I must say, by Aaron Johnson. However, he is certainly not as good as Kristin Scott Thomas, who…
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Langham Place The translator sent me this picture – I like how the daylight comes through the squared windows. ––
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The answer can be found in Doubt, the 2008 film adaptation of the John Patrick Shanley’s stage play Doubt: A Parable, which won a Pulitzer Prize: A woman was gossiping with her friend about a man whom they hardly knew…
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In Fall 2008, Stephen McLaughlin and Jim Carpenter edited an anthology (3785 pages) featuring 3164 poets. McLaughlin and Carpenter did not ask any of the writers for permission to print their works. In fact, the poems attributed to the individual…
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Love & Other Drugs – Last night we went to watch Love & Other Drugs in Covent Garden. Thank you, E, for the generosity! On the film: Anne, you are no Kate Winslet or Penelope Cruz (with reference to her own…
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The historian sent me this picture and I love it, for obvious reasons.
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“How They Met Themselves” (1860-64) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti Umberto Eco once wrote, ‘Two clichés make us laugh but a hundred clichés move us, because we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion.’ But where…
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Stonehenge, pictured by a member of the family in August, 2010. Stonehenge, in virtue of the simplicity of its plan, and its good preservation, is as if new and recent; and, a thousand years hence, men will thank this age…
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– This morning, the receptionist walked past this park near Festival Walk, pondering: ‘Is this Hong Kong?’ I responded: ‘好日本.’– ––
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This post was originally written on 5th July, 2009. – Yesterday we spent an evening in Islington. It was a beautiful day and we sat by Regent’s Canal and had a drink from the Narrow Boat Pub (Beer in a…
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A woman is sitting at home alone, one Saturday morning just before midday, when, unexpectedly, a knock comes at the door. On opening the door she finds, much to her surprise, an old friend whom she has not seen for…
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This morning, my friend sent me this picture, a close-up of a phone booth by the river. – –
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