Many phrases have entered common usage since Coronavirus began to dominate the headlines back in March: “social distancing”, “track and trace”, “immuno-compromised”. A phrase that has been around for many years but has only registered with me in the last few months, when reading articles about Coronavirus, is the “thousand-yard stare”. I first encountered it… Continue reading “Thousand-yard stares”
You remember telegrams, right? Or maybe not; maybe you’re too young. Recently I was explaining to my children, who are both teenagers, how telegrams used to work. They were the quickest way of sending a message composed of text to anyone in the world. They were also expensive, so people restricted the number of words… Continue reading Word of the week: telegram
Last month, over the Easter weekend, I finished re-reading “Ulysses”, James Joyce’s “illiterate, underbred book” in the words of Virginia Woolf. Or, if you prefer, “the most important expression which the present age has found … a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape” according to TS… Continue reading On re-reading “Ulysses”
My choices for “Album of the week” have become rather irregular. For six weeks in a row I managed to pick a different album each week, listen to it far more than I usually listen to a single disk, and then Blog about it. The reasons for starting the sequence were explained in this piece… Continue reading Album of the week: #9 “Sunrise” (Elvis Presley)
Recently I finished reading Susan Hill’s “Howards End is on the landing”, her memoir about “a year-long voyage through her books, in order to get to know her own collection again”. I started it in April 2017, and quoted from it at the time in this piece about typefaces, serifs and readability. I put the… Continue reading FAC OR REJECT
Just over four years ago, in December 2015, I took my first tentative steps in the world of Blogging with this piece about my local bookshop. The piece is short, a mere 162 words, and it notes that a section of the shop was called “Smart Thinking”. This appeared to be a fairly new category,… Continue reading No more “Self Help” at the bookshop
Earlier this month I wrote about Saul Bellow’s 1976 memoir “To Jerusalem and Back”, noting that I would “mention it again soon on these pages”. The phrase that prompted me to write that earlier piece, and which can be found on page 108 of my “Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics” edition, was “Now that the reading… Continue reading Word of the week: marginalia
“Now that the reading fit is on me again” is a phrase that leapt out at me earlier this week, in Saul Bellow’s “To Jerusalem and Back”, his 1976 work subtitled “A Personal Memoir”. It’s exactly how I feel when going through a reading binge. I did not expect to find the same sentiment expressed… Continue reading “Now that the reading fit is on me again” (Saul Bellow)
Earlier this month Cardinal John Henry Newman was canonized in Rome. The ceremony took place on Sunday 13 October, the Feast of St Edward the Confessor. I wasn’t there, but I was at the mass in September 2010 when Newman was beatified. It was the first such mass on English soil for many hundreds of… Continue reading Word of the week: Newman
As you may know, McCarthy is one of the more numerous Irish surnames. According to this page on the Irish Genealogy website, detailing the 20 most common surnames in Ireland from an 1890 study, it was 13th on the list. There have been plenty of prominent McCarthy’s in living memory, including Mick (past and current… Continue reading Word of the week: McCarthy
