Early in 2016, I wrote this piece about words and phrases that seem to crop up regularly in prize-winning fiction. One of them was antimacassar, “a piece of cloth put over the back of a chair to protect it from grease or hair-oil – macassar was used as a hair oil in Victorian and Edwardian… Continue reading Word of the week: antimacassar
A few months ago I wrote, in this piece, about readers in places like Nepal, Palau and the Falkland Islands, thousands of miles from West London where these words are being drafted. I noted that more than half of the countries in the world appear in the basic statistical information provided by WordPress about Visitors… Continue reading More about readers in distant places, and population
Starting on Wednesday 18 September 2019, ITV have been showing repeats of episodes from the first series of their quiz show “Tenable”, first broadcast in November 2016. Here are the questions from the first few episodes, in the same format as in other pieces on this Blog, such as this one from March 2019: a… Continue reading “Tenable” questions, series 1
Back in 2016, in this piece, I wrote about reading every Booker Prize winner. I had just finished Marlon James’s “A Brief History of Seven Killings”, which won in 2015. Until last month I had not read any of the books that won in the following three years. As of yesterday evening I am up-to-date… Continue reading On reading every Booker Prize winner, revisited
Happy birthday to me, and to all the people I mentioned in the first paragraph of this post from exactly two years ago. This year I am breaking my birthday rule, the one that states that you should have a party whenever the day falls on a Saturday. I thought about it but couldn’t be… Continue reading Breaking my birthday rule
If you have spent any time here in London you will probably be familiar with blue plaques, like this one: You will find them on buildings connected with people and organizations of note. The example above is on a row of houses close to Barnes Bridge on the south side of the river. It’s very… Continue reading Blue plaques, and a life that spanned three centuries
If you have any quiz books that were printed in the first decade of this century, they may well contain questions that are no longer valid, answers that are no longer correct, or answers that used to be unique but no longer are. This piece looks at 12 examples of such questions and answers, and… Continue reading 12 quiz questions that need updating
Feel free to leave a comment. Occasionally people do. Comments await approval before they are displayed on this Blog, so it might be a day or two before they appear. My most diligent readers email me directly about pieces, and tens of thousands of words have been drafted and sent in private email conversations. All… Continue reading Comments, and a selection of recent Spam
The new Trivia Season has begun. The three TV quiz formats that will reach their conclusions next spring are back on our screens: “University Challenge” began in July, “Mastermind” in August and “Only Connect” a week ago, on the first Monday in September. Once again “Only Connect” precedes “University Challenge” in an hour’s worth of… Continue reading Word of the week: amanuensis
The 2016 UK #1 “I took a pill in Ibiza” by Mike Posner is a recent addition to my repertoire. It was unfamiliar to me until last week. It reminds me of Joe South’s classic 1969 release “The games people play” (which peaked at #6) so I mix the two songs together. Ibiza is one… Continue reading More pop trivia: UK #1s that feature places
The Compartments 