The poet was a scientist The scientist was a poet The one always saw the world with the eyes of the other ‘In the microscope’, for instance Here too are cemeteries, fame and snow. And I hear murmuring, the revolt of immense estates. It is the view of one who understood the puzzle and theRead More
Ever since Eden was lost, we have been trying to find it again. Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors that followed him identified various parts of the Americas as the Garden of Eden. Confident claims for its location have been made for Mesopotamia, Armenia, Iran, Jackson County Missouri (according to some Mormons), and Bedford (according toRead More
Down a roadside divided by a canal, in the Dutch town of Franeker, you come across a smart museum frontage close to to a traditional Dutch brick building bearing the word ‘Planetarium’. Having purchased your ticket, you pass down narrow corridors built long before domestic spaces were designed to host public attractions. You enter anRead More
Michael Nesmith has died. You feel like a part of you has disappeared when a voice that has been at the back of your head for as long as you can remember just goes. Nesmith was the droll guy with the woolly hat in The Monkees’ TV show, which those of my age watched religiouslyRead More
I have been reading We Are Bellingcat, by Eliot Higgins. Subtitled ‘an intelligence agency for the people’, it is an account of the rise of of a group of dedicated open-source investigators, whose means of analysing openly available material on the Internet to investigate such stories on the downing of Malaysia Flight 17 to theRead More
I find this photograph fascinating. Not for the man with the motion picture camera that looks like some form of primitive machine gun, not for the late Victorian gentlemen oozing privilege to the tip of their top hats, but the man on the far left. He is half in, half out of the picture, lookingRead More
The first feature film that Buster Keaton directed, The Three Ages, is not perhaps as familiar as it should be. A comic history of love in prehistoric, Roman and modern times, it has Keaton fighting his rival, Wallace Beery, over a girl and winning her against the odds each time. Allegedly parodying Intolerance, it isRead More
If you visit the Lake District, there is one name in particular that is both omnipresent and yet almost completely invisible. There is much that promotes, celebrates or otherwise exploits the names of Wordsworth, Potter, Coleridge, Wainwright, but what of Rawnsley? What visitor to the Lakes knows of him. Yet go the central town ofRead More
Shortly after hearing the sad news that Neil Innes had died (on 29 December 2019), I sought out some of his music. The first tune that came up was the theme to The Innes Books of Records, his BBC Two television series that ran 1979-1982. A simple, ghostly figure on a jangly piano sets upRead More
For my talent is to give an impression upon words by punching, that when the reader casts his eye upon ’em, he takes up the image from the mould which I have made. Christopher Smart One of my favourite Kent walks is through the Fairlawne estate; those parts of it that are public, that is.Read More