Two Plays in One Fitts
In 1955, Dudley Fitts published a translation of Aristophanes'Frogs for Harcourt & Brace; in 1957, of the Birds. The two versions were issued separately by Faber in London, and, in 1959, paired in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Macaronic Frühneuhochdeutsch, anyone?
One passage of many such, from the 1883 Weimar Luther, volume 34 of 127; in this instance, from the 'text' of a sermon delivered on the evening of 11 April, Easter Tuesday 1531. Audivimus de...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Cryography
Well, a happy arbitrary point dividing two periods approximately corresponding to orbits of the Earth about the sun to all my readers, and I trust you all enjoyed yourselves in the appropriate, or at...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lens Grinding
In Skye I snapped away at the ice and frost quite happily, and at my comrades, who themselves snapped, with their crappy iPhones, at tree and face with wanton abandon. Only one of us demurred. Some of...
View ArticlePatience
'Old stone to new building. . .'Stephen Dillane pauses. He scrunches up his eyes, and clutches controlledly at the air, like some Chinese master channelling his ch'i. 'Old stone to new building—' The...
View ArticleOne mania after another
A frightful majority of our middle-class young men are growing up effeminate, empty of all knowledge but what tends directly to the making of a fortune; or rather, to speak correctly, to the keeping up...
View ArticleOn Neologism, Part One
The Scottish physician Thomas Short, at the end of a parenthesis on diseases, in the middle of a long footnote, extending over several pages through a discussion of chalybeate waters, from his 1734...
View ArticleClik here to view.
London Belongs To—
(In homage to, via intermittent pastiche of, the long defunct, and the funct, too.)Woken by a saleswoman of uncertain ethnicity; voice sounds like a machine, Stephen Hawking. Five minutes go by before...
View ArticleWhite and Momigliano
Hayden White spoke at the Courtauld on Wednesday night. Ken Clarke Lecture Theatre, a grand old room in pink, with white trim, like the inside of a wedding cake. A ghastly introduction from a fawning...
View ArticleHigh Table
And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer....
View ArticleClik here to view.
On Neologism, Part Two
[Part One here.]The Good Book.Lily and I—and, indeed, the rest of you, from afar—are approaching the fifth anniversary of our first romantic entanglement. At times like these we enjoy reminiscing about...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Glebe Place
Glebe Place, off the King's Road, Chelsea: home of artists since the 1880s. Fine old houses, in a variety of styles, although not quite as beautiful as those on Old Church Road and its neighbours north...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Periegesis Londinii
So far this year I have been writing less, and reading less; and walking more. Already I have undertaken fourteen London walks, a full stretch every Sunday, and recently a little extra during the week,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
On the Textures of West London
Sure, it's been a while. Not that I've had nothing to say: but my intellectual energies have of late been directed instead towards the munificent footnotes of my opus. I was going to return with an...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Unbridled Tongue
The precise origin of the expression 'as happy as Larry', like those of almost all modern colloquialisms, not to say colloquialisms dead to the present, has been swallowed in the fogs of time. The OED,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Flow gently, sweet Afton
You know when you haven't e-mailed someone for a while, and you feel you ought to, but the longer you leave it, the more embarrassed you feel about not contacting them, and the longer still you want to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Shrine of Ammon
Upper Clapton, on the edge of the largest Hasid community in London, just north of the old Murder Mile, an urim's throw from the Lea, and from the cricket grounds alongside Springfield Park, on the...
View ArticleIntercision
Imagine you're a harmless drudge. You've been assigned the task of scouring the works of Sir Thomas Browne for new words, or new uses of old words, or antedatings, and so you sit in your bright-lit...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Squaquarinellus
In Book 21 of Teofilo Folengo's Baldus (1517), a spoof epic in macaronic hexameters—that is, half Latin, half Italian, the latter frequently provincial—the eponymous hero and his friends find...
View Articlefauteuil de nuages
It is a little disconcerting, although perhaps appropriate, gruesomely, to our atomised age, to learn of a friend's death via Wikipedia. I had not seen Stanley around the Library recently, and a month...
View Article
