Reviews and other ponderings
One of my favourite pieces of comic writing is not by a comic writer at all, but an explorer. Apsley Cherry-Garrard, the youngest to Captain Scott’s party, writes here about his delivery of penguin eggs to the Natural History Museum. It should be noted that he and two others, who later died with Scott, spent [...]
I re-read ‘The Big Sleep’ the other day, and enjoyed it very much. I was reminded of a famous plot hole in the novel that came to light when William Faulkner was writing the screenplay. During filming, allegedly neither the director nor the screenwriters knew whether chauffeur Owen Taylor was murdered or had killed himself. [...]
Mass production has always been used as a swear word, in my experience. If something is described as mass produced, it is implied that it is cheap and nasty, and liable to fall apart at the first opportunity. The Left, in particular, always seem to have had a problem with it. We are invited to [...]
We keep getting told how publishing in undergoing its greatest transformation since Gutenberg, and perhaps it is. But our tendency to lump the whole history of publishing into one ‘pre-web’ catagory means we can forget how much it changed fairly recently. Publishing was last turned on its head in the 1980s. How it did might [...]
Many of us have heard some version of the famous story at the start of Stephen Hawking’ Brief History of Time: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the [...]
After an earlier post, where I suggested that libraries might use physical placeholders for ebooks, I had a little snoop around and found many ways of doing it. Here is one: I got the link to the epub file of Gutenberg Project’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’. I pasted it here, and you see the result below. [...]
I visited my daughter’s school a few evenings ago, which meant I got the chance to have a look at her school library. It was just what you would expect – lots of books, a nice environment. However, one thing struck me: a lot of the books on the shelves were now in the public [...]
I saw an interview this morning (YouTube here) with two of the creators of the new (wonderful) BBC Sherlock Holmes, Steven Moffat and Sue Vertue. Happily, they confirm there are more to come, but Mr Moffat said one thing that troubled my geeky soul. When talking about updating the stories, and putting them into a [...]
When I was about 9, my favourite book in the world was Milliganimals by Spike Milligan. It was full of silly poems about animals (many of which I can still recite from memory), silly drawings of animals, and, best of all, the silliest story ever written, called Bald Twit Lion. It starts like this: “Once, [...]
From Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo. The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin [...]