Christmas with Orson Welles, Dorothy Parker, Noam Chomsky, Ayn Rand and Mr...
It’s a few years old now but this look at the supposed Ten Least Successful Holiday Specials of all Time on the Whatever website is very funny indeed. Ayn Rand’s Christmas is particularly effective....
View ArticleChristmas – two views
This week’s Private Eye Michel Houellebecq and Bernard-Henri Levy conversing on the subject of Christmas in the style of their recent book of exchanges. Or rather, Craig Brown’s imagining of this....
View ArticleBooks of the Year 2011
Here they go, as they went. The Rights of Man – Thomas Paine The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler Selected English Essays – Jonathan Swift, William Hazlitt, Thomas de Quincey, Thomas Carlyle and others...
View ArticleQueen of the Hatchet
It’s great to see there is now an award for the Best Hatchet Job of the Year when it comes to book reviewing. Reading a good literary demolition job is often hugely enjoyable experience, even if it’s...
View ArticleOrwell on Dickens
“Dickens is good” shocker. He is though you know. And it’s his birthday, you may have noticed. I was never interested in Dickens at all during my teens, and school did nothing to counter this. I only...
View ArticleLynch me
Its impossible to capture the disturbing beauty of David Lynch’s films in words, but Nicolas Lezard’s article in The Guardian has a decent go. As Nicholas says “If ever there was a director who put...
View ArticleSurrealism via Stalinism
As I have noted before, I am not usually a fan of our near namesakes smuggoes at the pretendy-Marxist, ultra-libertarian Spiked. Every once in while they do come up with the goods though, as with this...
View ArticleLetters sent
Many of the greatest ideas are the simplest, those you can’t believe no-one has come up with before, and that definitely applies to the fascinating website Letters of Note. The site simply reproduces...
View ArticleYou write like…
Here’s an amusing diversion: “I Write Like” a ‘statistical analysis tool’ which you can drop any example of your, or someone else’s writing into, and it will then tell you which classic author your...
View ArticleWilde and Morris, saving socialism’s soul
Communism was a disaster, capitalism is a disaster. Let’s listen to a couple of old Victorian gents and give socialism a go.
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