Category: t
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“In the 1950s, art historian Kenneth Clark distinguished between the terms ‘nude’ and ‘naked’. For him, ‘nakedness’ implies discomfort and embarrassment. Nudity meant not ‘a huddled and defenceless body, but … a balanced, prosperous and confident body: the body re-formed’.…
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[More about Eadweard Muybridge here.] Nicholas Royle in The Uncanny (2003) answers: It is usually traced back to 1876, to a man called Boirac who wrote: ‘It has happened that, seeing for the first time a monument, a landscape, a person,…
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Last Saturday after a day in the city, we went to the Serpentine Gallery in Hyde Park to see an exhibition by the Paris-based French-Algerian artist Philippe Parreno (b. 1964). The exhibition has been getting a lot of attention for its…
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Scene 1 A restaurant. Leeds. J: Can we see the wine list, please? Waitress: Yes, you may. Scene 2 A second-hand bookstore. Central London. Shopkeeper (to me): How may I help you, honey? J: She’s with me. Shopkeeper: Oh I…
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In today’s Guardian, twelve writers write about their favourite short stories. Jeanette Winterson pens a beautiful description of Italo Calvino’s “The Night Driver” (from his 1967 collection t zero). I couldn’t find a link to it so I’m typing it…
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In her hugely enjoyable book, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (first published in 1994 — mine is the Vintage’s 1995 version) the mythographer, novelist and historian Marina Warner answers: The earliest extant version of ‘Cinderella’ to…
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––Read Liu’s “from “Experiencing Death””.––
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SEE MORE PICTURES HERE. When it comes to collecting, I have nothing on Robert Opie. Opie is an avid collector of consumer products and packaging which are on display at The Museum of Brands, Packaging and Advertising in Notting Hill.…
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–This morning in Hong Kong, the receptionist took this between the MK and Hunghom stations: At this point, the receptionist is dreamily flying, ––
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My friend the graphomaniac bookworm sent me some wonderful pictures and below is one of them. – “This one was taken in Senegal, from inside a taxi, on the road from N’gueniene to Dakar. The colourful, hand-painted vehicle you can…
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–Samuel Johnson in The Rambler (1750) answers: If a life be delayed till interest and envy are at an end, we may hope for impartiality, but must expect little intelligence; for the incidents which give excellence to biography are of…
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Thursday 9 December, 2010. 10:30am.
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This is a photograph taken by my friend yesterday morning at around half past seven. The illusion of calm before the city entirely awoke: ––
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–My friend took this picture. Be quiet — music is banned. Kowloon Tong, 9:10am At this point, the receptionist is late for work already.––
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–A.D. Nuttall in Overheard by God: Fiction and Prayer in Herbert, Milton, Dante and St John (1980) answers: Greek tragedy owes its special force to the stratified coexistence of two ethical worlds. The older stratum is one in which men…
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Yesterday, my friend sent me this picture, taken from a moving bus. – –
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––In a discussion of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, Harold Bloom (2004) answers: Since Innocence and Experience are states of the soul through which we pass, neither is a finality, both are necessary, and neither is wholly preferable…
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Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983) is a fictional memoir of Wilde, written (supposedly) between 9 August 1900 and his death on 30 November that year. In the book, Wilde writes in a letter to a friend, ‘the…
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In The Grand Design: New Answers to the Ultimate Questions of Life (2010), co-written by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow: The Chinese tell of a time during the Hsia dynasty (c. 2205-c.1782 BC) when our cosmic environment suddenly changed. Ten suns appeared in…
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Download The Pipettes’s “Santa’s On His Way”! Absolutely free. ––
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I came across this interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick on Nic Sebastian’s blog Very Like A Whale and was intrigued. In July, Kathleen submitted some poems to us on behalf of her husband, W.F. Lantry. Royston, J and I selected “Rainbow Bridge”…
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This post was originally written on 9th September, 2009. Foyles Bookstore, London Tonight we saw John Banville (who is also Benjamin Black) at a free author’s talk organised by the Foyles Bookstore. In the event, Banville discussed his latest novel,…
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I was gripped from the opening seconds of Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker about an elite Army bomb squad whose main job is to defuse roadside bombs. The film uses suspense masterfully to suggest the tension and fear of the…
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“It was on account of these things that mamma got her for such low pay, really for nothing: so much, one day when Mrs. Wix had accompanied her into the drawing-room and left her, the child heard one of the…
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Baozi Inn, ChinatownSaturday 4th Decemer, 2010, 12:30pm
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–The Ghost is based on the novel by Robert Harris of the same title. We thought it was a fine old-fashioned thriller; it reminded one of both Hitchcock and the paranoid thrillers of the 1970s. Directed by Roman Polanski, the…
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Seen at the South Kensington tube station on a Saturday afternoon
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James Wood (2008) answers: The kind of metaphor I most delight in […] estranges and then instantly connects, and in doing the latter so well, hides the former. The result is a tiny shock of surprise, followed by a feeling…
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–Ian McEwan (2001) answers: [I]t was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest…
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