Other Men's Flowers

Professor David Colquhoun has been looking at the examination set in January this year by the University of Salford, which was intended to ...

Global recession has clearly brought out the Dunkirk spirit in us, with ordinary people putting their noses to the grindstone, shoulders to ...

My extreme reluctance to immerse myself in water except when it's in a bath, lightly perfumed and at exactly the right temperature, goes...

One doesn't hear much about this nowadays, but according to The Companion to British History it was a method of capital punishment popu...

It is not surprising that a party which thinks so highly of traditional (i.e. nineteenth-century) values should want to introduce a Victoria...

My friend Eric , a legendary guitar-playing fly-fishing law professor in Greensboro, NC, quoted AlaskaReport last Sunday as announcing that...

Recycled posts from 2005: people A supermodel's childhood overshadowed by glamorous biscuits sport Max Schmeling was one of the good guy...

Even before you were liquidated by Stalin, it probably wasn't a lot of fun being a kulak. Even less, I would guess, being a burlak ; the...

I enjoy reading obituaries, not so much in a morbid way, or with schadenfreude (good, I've outlasted him ), but to marvel at the extraor...

Playwright David Edgar, in a fascinating piece in the Guardian , notes that the same summary can describe more than one play, film or story,...

Tomorrow will be the centenary of Louis Blériot's crossing of the Channel in his eleventh contraption. No doubt the Daily Mail will be m...

Last week I went to see the touring production of Emma Rice's ingenious multimedia take on David Lean's film Brief Encounter . Afte...

Not much junk comes through the letter-box nowadays and it's no great chore to transfer it from the doormat into the paper recycling box...

Moving on, giggling, from reading about a man in Düsseldorf who tried to fix his air mattress using tyre repair solvent, causing an explosio...

No 21 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century February 1905: Lottie to Miss Hollands in Higham, Kent from Rochester:...

Only two hat-wearers have been featured more than once in the Oxford Enchiridion of Egregious Headgear . The first is our Queen, who has ma...

Ballymackleduff, Derryfubble, Benburb : Address of subscriber in the Northern Ireland Telephone Directory Oh, the world was full of grievi...

Some of the best Punch cartoons had no captions. Here is Ronald Searle, 1955.

Having made an abortive attempt to get a degree in mechanical engineering, I did get far enough advanced in pure mathematics to be able to a...

I am usually pleased to get emails from The Reverend Brendan Powell Smith, but the one that came this week brought some rather sombre news....