Monday, 31 March 2014

We've been foodies as long as we've been farmers

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Constant harvesting of the grain encouraged the plants to grow larger and more abundantly, so maize quickly became plentiful - farmers gene...
Thursday, 27 March 2014

A cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue

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I detest Punningans Wake in which a cancerous growth of fancy word-tissue hardly redeems the dreadful joviality of the folklore and the easy...
Wednesday, 12 March 2014

The existence of Simla was itself a comment on the astonishing complacency of the British in India

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The existence of Simla was itself a comment on the astonishing complacency of the British in India at this period: for seven months of the ...
Tuesday, 11 March 2014

There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach

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There is a boy across the river with a bottom like a peach But alas! I cannot swim Khushal Khan, quoted in W. Dalrymple, Return of a King...
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Friday, 14 February 2014

The sea has become the land, in that it is now the usual medium of transit: not barrier but corridor

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The discovery of the sea roads necessitated a radical re-imagining of the history of Europe. Try it yourself, now. Invert the mental map yo...
Wednesday, 12 February 2014

One does not advertise ideas as though they were laxatives or toothpaste

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'One does not advertise ideas as though they were laxatives or toothpaste,' said the Emperor Karl, last of the Hapsburg Emperors of...
Tuesday, 11 February 2014

And the newspapers someone dares to be happy because there were no human victims!

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He [Nietzsche] was an aesthete, and not only in a green-carnation-wearing, stained-glass fancying sense of the word. He was one who valued ...