“Nothing but sky and the barren ground”
Two teasers for a start. A new hotel on the outskirts of Moscow: It is even further out of town and stands next to an enormous strip club. Several of my fellow guests are wearing T-shirts with a picture of…
Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Two teasers for a start. A new hotel on the outskirts of Moscow: It is even further out of town and stands next to an enormous strip club. Several of my fellow guests are wearing T-shirts with a picture of…
Since 1967, the UK parliament has abolished or curtailed a number of ancient privileges available to criminal defendants in England and Wales. Double jeopardy is no longer prohibited; unanimous verdicts are not required; the right to remain silent has been…
Tim Parks, a British novelist living in Italy since 1981, writes about an English translation of an Italian novel: Imagine I am reading a novel for review, something translated from Italian, a language I know well… …“At this point,” I…
The German terms Cäsarenwahn and Cäsarenwahnsinn gained some currency in the second half of the 19th century thanks to a novel by Gustav Freytag, a psychiatric treatise by Friedrich Wiedermeister, and a historical study by Ludwig Quidde. In the last…
Streetwise Professor (Craig Pirrong) explained spoofing on electronic exchanges in this post three years ago. Yesterday, he wrote about the US Department of Justice (DOJ) indicting a group of traders for alleged spoofing. The stunning part of the indictment is…
I’ve linked before to James Wood’s review of Pushkin: A Biography by T.J. Binyon. I’m linking to it again for this observation: Sylvia Plath once longed to write a poem that might be roomy enough to include a toothbrush. But…
In 1967, the present editor-in-chief of The Economist was born into an old family of Salopian landowners. On July 7, 1866, – a hundred and one years earlier – The Economist ran an article titled Influence of Entails on Agriculture.…
Here’s a simplified timeline related to the previous two posts. William Beddoes (1710-1774) bought Cheney Longville in Shropshire in 1745. His first son Thomas (1746-1822) married Priscilla Minton (1754-1819), the daughter of the manor holder in Minton, Church Stretton, Shropshire.…
William Francis Minton Beddoes (1858-1928) – whose real estate passed to his nephew, Zanny Minton Beddoes’s grandfather – was listed in the Domesday Book of 1873 as the owner of 769 acres of land yielding a gross rental income of…
Poem L in Housman’s A Shropshire Lad begins: Clunton and Clunbury,Clungunford and Clun,Are the quietest placesUnder the sun. In Clun, you can admire the ruins of a 13-th century castle. From Clunbury, there’s only a six-mile, fifteen-minute drive to the…
It’s hard to argue against Lee Kovarsky‘s position that DNA fingerprinting offers a cognitive method so powerful that no sane person, not even a judge, can honestly ignore all the discoveries made through its application. It’s likewise impossible to accept…
“How do you know?” and “Can you prove it?” are natural reactions to strong claims and far-fetched conjectures, especially when they are passed as universally acknowledged facts. If I were sure that journalists always followed the same principles guiding fact-gathering…