Other Men's Flowers

Writing a post the other day about the famous New Statesman competitions, I recalled some of the prizewinning entries in (much) earlier yea...

My friend Grumio and I were not among the countless billions who prepared to be whisked up to Paradise last week, or alternatively to be lef...

A friend asked me the other day if I knew the riddle about three men who had to compete in working out whether a black or a white patch had ...

It is many years since I subscribed to New Statesman —in fact, I don't think I ever did, I used to read it in the library—but for some r...

Last Sunday's edition was typical. The front page was dominated by a photograph and an article on Kate McCann, and the "News" ...

I have a PVR which enables me to record TV programmes for watching at convenient times (for example, when I am not dozing, or eating, or tra...

"Nuptial" can mean relating to marriage or weddings , but in zoology it refers to the characteristic breeding behaviour, coloratio...

Feature article on page 12 of the Sunday Times , April 10th 2011: "...research found that 88% of parents feared that children were u...

"I'm sorry if what I'm setting out to do hasn't communicated itself...Listening to the vote this morning, if I've not ...

Interesting to see that Gbagbo and his forces of the Ivory Coast Christian south have been finally beaten by the forces of the Muslim north ...

If I have any kind of individual writing style then it is a careless blend of the highfalutin' and the demotic or even racy; in other wo...

We like naming things, so much so that a multilingual glossary of some groups of names would be a hefty volume. Take insects , for example;...

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...