What exactly happened in the upper village square of the Old Village in Alonnisos on the 15 th of August 1944 [1] ? One hears various ...

The Colombian Congress is, it seems, notorious for the frequent absence of its senators or whatever they’re called. So a concerned senator ...

The government of India has been for some time trying to supply lavatories to every house in the country. Of course they didn’t bother to a...

Someone appeared in our village today on a wooden bicycle. Almost inescapably for a bicycle of otherwise conventional ‘safety’ pattern, ...

Today is Robert Schumann’s birthday. (Or would have been were he still alive; you know what I mean.) Robert was a bit of a loony and it sho...

But Does it Work ?   In one of his films the character played by Woody Allen is worried about a possible injury to his brain. ‘But ...

Today is the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot agreement. The what? Well, much as the Americans find it more convenient to fi...

Recently a friend was walking through NW3 -- where the middle-class intellectuals live -- and overheard a child ask 'Mummy, is there a ...

Over Easter I was talking with an Athens publisher, and he told me that he has been unable to find any Greek guide to the plots - silly as...

Some popular musician whose stuff no-one really liked drops dead in the lift (!) of his vastly expensive house, and everyone rushes...

It has been Greek Orthodox Easter. The Paschal lamb (in fact a goat) is slaughtered, roast whole on a spit, and eaten; the best wine i...

Shakespeare died 400 years ago this week. His writings, and tendentious fantasies about his life, are being celebrated, especially in ...

As a professional writer I want as many people as possible to read my stuff, but (except when I myself choose to make something freel...

  Lewis Carroll, real name Charles Dodgson, has several direct or indirect claims to fame or, some would say, notoriety. He is best k...

Today is Lacan's birthday, or would have been had he lived that long. He was born on April the 13th 1901.

That’s the catchily alliterative name that has been given to the huge collection of documents (not as a rule in fact in paper form) l...

I mentioned the other day that among my current bedside books is/are the collected poems of Marianne Moore. I said that she’s suppose...

The other day I said some things that might be misinterpreted as derogatory towards that lovely instrument the viola. In many ways th...

That’s the title of a book I read a year or two ago; a paean to cigarettes written by someone as a prelude to giving them up. Full of...

It is usual on April the first to write spoof news reports and I suppose blog entries. But when the president of the United States vi...

Ask any layperson ‘What must the surgeon be careful to check before he sews the patient up again?’ and you will of course get the rep...

Today is Melanie Klein's birthday, or would be were she still alive. (She was born in 1882). Melanie who? It's possible that the on...

  That was the title of a BBC programme on, I think, Radio 3. They had decided that 11 p.m. was the correct bedtime for decent God-fe...

I’ve just remembered another anecdote of the Brontë   sisters. It seems two of them were out walking one Spring day during the lambing...

W.B. Yeats had, unsurprisingly, a complex attitude to the Easter Rising and Irish Nationalism in general. He loved Ireland, but like ...

POBLACHT NA H EIREANN THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: ...