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
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
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
