My Commonplace Blog

Certainly by the fourth millenium BCE: remains found in a northern Kazakh burial site from that period contained ten tons of animal bones. 9...

Once upon a time we were all hunters and gatherers. The first to stop hunting and gathering did so no more than 12,000 years ago, which is b...

The index, after all, did not arrive alone, but is rather the youngest sibling of a whole family of writing tools that arrived in a flurry i...

For a moment Meg was shocked. Isabel had, indeed, played the part of a loyal wife in all this; but had her loyalty rested on no securer foun...

The man and his work were one. Evelyn Waugh later described Wodehouse’s work as timeless, but it is also immutable. The comparative lack of ...

The moral test with which Wodehouse was confronted in June 1941 was one that was beyond him. In addition to his upbringing, there was his te...

Wodehouse was not alone in flirting with the studios. The talkies had triggered a new gold rush, anticipated by Herman Mankiewicz when in 19...