Other Men's Flowers

Either the questions are getting easier or standards of erudition and culture are rising; those who say they got ten right are not necessar...

...to cartoonist David Langdon. I posted some of his cartoons in 2009 to wish him a happy 95th birthday and now comes the sad news that he d...

My CV (which can be found by going  HERE and scrolling down), includes one item of which I always been particularly proud. This, the second...

There is a TV series running at the moment called Death in Paradise . It is described as a comedy drama but is in fact not in the least funn...

Under this title The Washington Post has offered, every week since 1993, a wordplay contest , "an irreverent mix of highbrow and lowbr...

These annual awards are a means of dishonouring each year's most outstanding enemy of reason; winners in previous years have included Sa...

One reason for not liking Hallowe'en much is that its feeble modern version has been imported from America (never mind about Walpurgisna...

The mixture as before :  questions suited to people with ragbag minds. Some of the questions are dreary, some obscure and some merely silly...

It used to be said that no ship, not even a warship, could be ugly....

I have never been plagued by superstitious obsessions: I do not feel compelled to avoid walking on lines in the pavement, or to wash my hand...

Rotten of Hamlet to tease the silly old fool Polonius, getting him to cravenly correct himself and say that yes, it was like a weasel, or a ...

Some of my friends have noted that I have several things in common with pregnant women. It is true, of course, that I have never actually be...

The internet – particularly the blogosphere – provides great opportunities for sociological study. One can compare and contrast the aspira...

Heartwarming compliments on my post of 30th September have poured in from all over the world: such perceptive observations as "fatuous ...

These are suited to people with ragbag minds. Some of them are dreary, some obscure and some merely silly (I mean the questions, not the peo...

I consider myself fortunate to have failed dismally, twice, in my half-hearted attempt to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering, for I know...

It is difficult to list groups of unpleasant people in order of detestability, classifying them from the utterly wicked to the merely sleazy...

Tasting menus in restaurants, basically a lot of little bits of stuff served consecutively, apparently became increasingly popular during th...

No 34 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century    January 1934   From Louis Landsberg in Aachen: Thank ...

N.F. Simpson, who recently died aged 92, wrote a play called The One Way Pendulum ; I have treasured lines from it for years, including thes...