Jeremy Keith (aka Adactio) had a fun quiz on his website a couple of days ago. Fonts or food? offered up 25 chances to decide whether a word was the name of a font or a food. Challenge accepted, I scored 20/25. Two foods turned out to be fonts and three fonts turned out to be foods. A fine oppor...

Adam Gopnik’s excellent article on H. G. Wells in a recent New Yorker contained a brief passage that made me reach for a note.

Wells’s elevation was made easier by the booming press of the time. P. G. Wodehouse, who was, improbably, a good friend of Wells’s, recalled, “There were so many morni...

This is something new, on two counts. It records a hike we took together in the country, The Squeeze and I. And it uses a new template I made specifically for photos. That is explained elsewhere.

Twitter passed me by at the start, and if I am honest I still don't really get it. Today, though, I was bringing in old posts as usual, and they included links to a couple that were, to put it delicately, skeptical about Twitter's chances. Tim Bray got one thing very right:

The basic problem i...

I was very disappointed by the latest Thinking Allowed. Paul Freedman explained why, as his new book claims, Food Matters, but Laurie Taylor gave the distinguished perfesser a very gentle ride. Freedman said that academe denigrates and dismisses research into food, which it surely does. He then re...