Other Men's Flowers

News item today: Singapore Airlines has equipped its new aircraft with special cupboards big enough to take a corpse in case any passengers ...

Nothing illustrates better the remark about Britain and America being two nations divided by a common language than our respective words for...

Shakespeare's great, isn't he? I mean, there he was, taking the mickey out of My luve's like a red, red, rose a century and a h...

Many blogs provide links to other blogs or websites that the author likes, often described as Favourites or even Favorites . There are so m...

These are the numbers of search results you get, in millions, if you put these names into Google: 6.9 Shakespeare 3.5 Hitler 3.3 Buddha 3.1 ...

This is how they write "aluminium" in North America. An American friend was asking me about this curious misspelling and it seems ...

Some years ago a very rich and generous Chinese friend gave me a Rolex; he was from Hong Kong, but this was no fake. After a couple of month...

We've got a lot of these in English, but they don't seem to have put foreigners off learning the language. The ones most of them pro...

The playwright Alan Bennett, in a rare interview some years ago, revealed that he carries a small notebook in which he writes down remarks t...

Enough of this pseudo-intellectual posturing, these pretentious literary musings! Away with those vicious jibes and that snide criticism! Cu...

Few of my regular readers will be unaware that the Sepher Yetzirah , or Book of Formation , is perhaps the oldest Rabbinical treatise of Kab...

I have knocked about the world a bit and I cannot understand why it is that until today I had never heard of what is clearly an admirable or...

Nothing is easier to parody than poetic romanticism, whether it's Housman 's pessimistic kind: What? Still alive at twenty-two? A fi...

Bad sight of the week is the misery of little Romeo Beckham "being comforted by his mother". What, exactly, is making him sob so p...

As anyone who has read Victorian novels, newspapers or the Punch of the period will know, writers in those days rarely used one word where ...

Next Friday, 18th June 2004, will be a significant day in the history of both the Isle of Wight and the People's Republic of China . A ...

A few days ago BBC4 showed a film nearly three hours long about two little girls training for the Mass Games in Pyongyang, the greatest chor...

I can’t resist giving another airing to this very old (and true) story about a meeting in Europe a few years ago. The matter under discussio...

At the spring exhibition of a local art group the other day I heard that some artists had cancelled their memberships because they felt that...

It was heart-rending to watch a man with such a tenuous grasp on reality struggling to express himself in a language he barely speaks. The P...