Other Men's Flowers

No 6 in a fortnightly series of extracts from The Postcard Century June 1929: Mr Sherwood, a passenger, writes aboard the aeroplane to hi...

Last month the universally admired playwright and author Alan Bennett, in an interview about the donation of his archives to the Bodleian, ...

Max Beerbohm describes in a 1910 essay his pleasure in finding on a station bookstall a book entitled How Shall I Word It ? and sub-entitled...

We don't hear much about the former nowadays; there are still plenty of the latter around, and we can learn their views in some newspape...

Over the past five years forty-four hats have been featured in Other Men's Flowers. They are variously impressive, frightening, prepost...

Froog, the Boulevardier of Beijing, has some notes here on the wondrous things, in pronunciation or translation, that the Chinese can do wi...

Andrew O’Hagan in this month's issue of The London Review of Books looks at some compilations of recordings by writers issued by the Br...

No 5 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century September 1922: D from Harrogate to Miss Bowling in Hutton le Hole: We ...

I wrote a couple of days ago about the table tennis champion who went on to a distinguished career as an administrator after gaining degrees...

I am to sport what Amy Winehouse is to post-structuralism, but I did make a living from it for some years (sport, not the other thing) and i...

From Dorothy Parker's Not So Deep as a Well (1937): Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song, A medley of extemporanea; And love is a thing...

Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile? Isn't it a nobby one And just the proper style? I should like to have one Just ...

We are all much more relaxed nowadays about how we address one another: your plumber won't care whether you call him Mr Chrascz or Sid, ...

November 4th 2008 It's five minutes to midnight here in the UK and five minutes to seven in Washington DC. It looks as if the result mos...

More recycled posts from 2004 accents The melodious voice of a Lancashire sheep farmer politics Four nations with one unquestionably the fin...

No 4 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century July 1913: From Brixton, Miss E Toombs in Sussex receives this torrid c...

Observations and recollections by Jan Morris after half a century of European eating. [... continued from HERE ] ¶ A Lithuanian national di...

That perceptive traveller Jan Morris has these observations and recollections after half a century of eating European: ¶ The Italians eat mo...

Mists we shall probably have, and maybe a hint of mellow fruitfulness, but the other manifestations of this time of year are less romantical...

Ecclesiastes, 11:4 (...he can just lie around) As Member Number 8158 of the 13,580 members (in 66 countries) of the Cloud Appreciation Socie...