Category UK

Newton’s laws

The opening sentence of a recent piece by Laura Spinney in The Guardian: Isaac Newton apocryphally discovered his second law – the one about gravity – after an apple fell on his head. Newton’s second law of motion is F…

Defiance or escapism?

I was trying to write a sensible comment to a piece on Medium, It’s Time We Tell the Truth about the Rolling Stones, when I came across a stunning essay by Margo Jefferson. Ripping Off Black Music, published in 1973…

Olalla II

How did R. L. Stevenson intend Olalla to be pronounced – in English, since he wrote in English? (The Spanish pronunciation is discussed in the comments to Baia, the post at Language Hat’s that inspired this and the previous one.)…

Olalla

On Independence Day, Language Hat wrote: Reading The Recognitions… involves encountering a whole lot of allusions, and one of them was to a Saint Olalla. Wanting to make sure I was pronouncing that right (/oˈlayə/, in Americanized form), I looked…

Kipling and Carlyle

Reading Faramerz Dabhoiwala‘s review of three books on British imperial history, I saw this quote from 1911 concerning West Indians of color: …lazy, vicious and incapable of any serious improvement, or of work except under compulsion. In such a climate…

Dim and mighty

Here’s an extract from The Rainbow (1915) by D. H. Lawrence describing Will Brangwen’s infatuation with German religious art: These were the finest carvings, statues, he had ever seen. The book lay in his hands like a doorway. The world…

That mural sea

Reviewing Evgeny Boratynsky and the Russian Golden Age by Anatoly Liberman, Sibelan Forrester remarks: Russians who read Anglophone poetry in the Soviet period turned to the works available, which were largely translations or original editions of poetry from the era…

No Dryden, no Pope and no Gray’s “Elegy”

For English-language coverage of the protests in Russia, I’d probably recommend Kevin Rothrock‘s Twitter feed as a starting point. What’s different about this year’s Navalny-triggered protests are the high participation rate (relative to the population) outside of Moscow and St.…

Marmalade skies

Apparently, one of the bigger Brexiteer bugbears has been the belief that a Briton could be criminally prosecuted for breaking the EU directive on the production and sale of marmalade, jam and other preserves (Council Directive 2001/113/EC) – and, crucially,…

Henry George and a land value tax in Scotland

From Farmers Weekly, a British magazine: A land value tax could be introduced in Scotland as part of the country’s ongoing reform journey. The proposals are included in the Land and property taxation in Scotland: Initial scoping of options for…