Other Men's Flowers

Many English people feel that to call yourself Dr X unless your doctorate is in divinity or medicine is barely permissible, though in certai...

I have noted elsewhere some examples of translations from French , Spanish and Italian . Here is a classic account of a noble struggle with...

They were sugar-coated eggs. We had wedged this one in a tree and the badgers got most of the others; perhaps we shouldn't have hidden ...

The erudite Grumio reminds us that, in addition to chocolate and rabbits, this is also a time when Hot Cross Buns are much in our thoughts. ...

The Soho philosopher and wit Grumio who writes all too rarely online was for once only half right when, in a comment on yesterday’s post abo...

Today my local hypermarket has a magnificent display of Bargain Lo-Fat Gluten-Free Fair-Trade Organic Non-GM Free-Range Starch-Reduced EASTE...

When I was eleven years old a friend lent me a book. I remember that it had a red cover with a picture of a tree on it; I could not see the ...

A while ago I saw on a French train something which I coveted. Fortunately I had with me a penknife which, though useless to a Swiss soldie...

[Nos 194 and 195 in an occasional series] What a veritable cockpit of serendipity is the internet! This morning, searching, for reasons whic...

From the OED quotation files comes this snippet from a Will of 1710: J. Addison Tatler , As an eternal Monument of my Affection and Friends...

…because it’s only March, but today has been an absolutely perfect day. After breakfast I lit a cigarette and went to the open window to ins...

Among the 20th century authors whose works I find mostly unreadable are two who inspire many people with a devotion and respect which are, ...

I was taken to task the other day for ending a sentence with a preposition. I long ago acquired the mellowness that comes with extreme age, ...

There was a brief item in the Channel 4 News last night about the strikes which are causing chaos in France. It featured the remarks of a li...

Writing last month about some cold weather we were having, I was wrong to be so dismissive about its severity and duration. The freeze and s...

Easy, you say: if you’re American, drop it into a mailbox; if British, into a pillar box (whence, confusingly, their mail is collected by th...

Amazingly, or perhaps not, the 419 scam , which started in 1989, is still going strong, and people are still falling for it at the rate of a...

We’ve just had a cold spell, in some places BELOW FREEZING, with some snow; this caused a few small inconveniences, mostly affecting people ...

A few months ago, in a rather confused post which arrived at Offenbach’s song Les Deux Gendarmes by way of musings about South Pacific an...

According to a new book called Shakespeare Goes to Paris by John Pemble, the French rejected Shakespeare for several hundred years because ...