My Commonplace Blog

It is an astonishing contrast to be going at fifteen miles a day one day and at fifteen hundred the next. I had so got into the habit of mov...

I said to myself that governing seemed to be a very difficult business. To pay the troops who kept the dictatorship in power the people were...

We both liked to spend our leisure in the open air, he shooting, I ski-ing. … But then? Peter thought me too serious and I did not understan...

Peter’s attitude was one of wonder at discovering the ways of the nomads, ways that are as old as the world. I, on the other hand, was going...

The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse,...

Even Chinese food seems allied to the quality of the land, It includes no bones, is prepared so as to be eaten with chopsticks, triturated,...

Rabbits are immigrants. They appeared in England only around the thirteenth century, as imports bred for fur, but escaped to the wild like m...