Band which you (and I) would be very surprised to find that I think is totally great to listen to:

Earth, Wind, and Fire.

So, in the interest of continuing to educate myself in Film, and really enjoying being fascinated by the material cultural and settings of old movies, and being in the mood for a little Cold War Paranoia, I watched The Manchurian Candidate (1962) for the first time. Its racism is certainly more nuanced than I expected, for instance. I loved the ( Read more... )

So last night my dream included watching the coronation of the Prince of Wales. The most impressive part of the dreaming process was that somehow my subconscious had the historical presence of mind to label him King Charles III.

Album I had forgotten about, but which really impresses me upon re-listen:

Throbbing Gristle, 20 Jazz Greats.

Just been watching (oh, the internet!) Angelo Mathews destroy the middle of the Indian batting order; having taught in Scarborough, and being a big fan of Sri Lankla's bowlers, they have become my favourite international cricket team by far ( Read more... )

I am interested to find Coleridge's characterization of Hazlitt's manners as "singularly repulsive; brow-hanging, shoe-contemplative, strange."

I wonder if that is the earliest occurence of the "shoe-gazer" in our English idiom?

Lately I have been running up hard against the classic problem of the bibliophile ( Read more... )

A post by sizztheseed reminds me that I just read a review of a new book on Prince Bandar by Patrick Tyler, who describes how George Tenet, visiting Bandar's palace in Riyadh in 2004,

suddenly aware that he is the designated scapegoat for the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and not adequately sedated by a sleeping pill, allegedly emerges from ( Read more... )

Whilst ladies persist in maintaining the strictly defensive condition, men must naturally, as it were, take the opposite line, that of attack; otherwise, if both parties held aloof, there woud be no more marriages; and the two hosts would die in their respective inaction, without ever coming to a battle. Thus it is evident that as the ladies will ( Read more... )

Ah, yes, Carlyle's Past and Present. It's a pretty remarkable, sprawling book, an excoriating piece of social criticism, written in a Hell of a Prose Style, which you will either adore or be bewildered by. But essentially Carlye's book has two parts: "The Ancient Monk" contrasted with "The Modern Worker," bookended by a "Proem" and "Horoscope ( Read more... )