Other Men's Flowers

A few years ago I wrote a post about my first employers and their products  (or, rather, one of them; I omitted to mention another of our be...

When visiting one of the many parts of the world where they speak a language of which I have no knowledge, I always try to master a few phr...

More re-cycled posts from 2005:   literature Books that sound fascinating but probably aren't religion Sadly, now topical: fatuous...

I have just discovered that several versions of this probably apocryphal story have been circulating for years. Why had I never heard it unt...

The website World of Soviet Groceries  is not nearly as exciting as it sounds, though it does give an accurate if depressing picture of wha...

Last Thursday was an important anniversary for me, and by an extraordinary co-incidence it was also an anniversary for the great Cab Callowa...

No 33 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century July 1933  Chicago needed good news. With Roosevelt 's New Deal t...

KSJ Tracker is a service for science journalists, created and funded by the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program at the Massachuset...

A couple of years ago I published a post about the invitations which I occasionally receive from my old school . It would be hypocritical t...

In a couple of earlier posts I described the major events in Egypt in 1952 and 1953, in particular my arrival in Ismailia in February 1952, ...

Here's an extract from The Flavour Thesaurus by Niki Segnit:     Avocado and Lime: Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra singing ‘Some Velv...

Here is a picture of the British landing from their boats before the battle of Quebec, on September 17th, 1759. The leaders on both sides, W...

Earlier this month I wrote about the incorporation of the Oxford Thesaurus into The Online Oxford Dictionary. Exciting news indeed, but I om...

Earlier this month a reader's letter in Private Eye drew attention to an advertisement which had appeared in Eye 1279. It is a tiny ad...

Maths jokes, let alone good ones, are rare, and I am indebted to my friend Froog, eminent Sinologist, former barrister and now doyen of the ...

No 33 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century May 1930    A  scene set for any amoral tale of Berlin's cabaret ye...

Anne teaches mathematics, and our friend Grumio gave her this Christmas present: He had it produced for Anne by TheoryMine, whose detail...

When people  stumble across a blog which seems to have no obvious theme or purpose, they naturally wonder what it is about. What's the p...

No, we had that one in the cookhouse a few days ago. On a similar theme is the remarkable anagram devised for a crossword clue by that gre...

Here is a rude song and then a reconstruction of what happened 97 years ago today.