Other Men's Flowers

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.  

By all means make the most of mistletoe over the next few days, but pay no attention to the claims of the pathetic remnant which used to cal...

More re-cycled posts from 2005 personal The idiot took me seriously food and drink It used to be no fun to eat at sea society The e...

Amazing what a top embalmer can do.

It is a truism that many top film-makers spend lucrative if uncredited time working on television commercials. It may be sad to think that t...

Sly innuendo is not something you expect to encounter when you consult the Oxford English Dictionary. However, in announcing the publicati...

For at least seven hundred years efforts have been made to stop people playing football. Sadly, this noble cause has never had much success....