The Plashing Vole

Bunyan (1628) and Blake (1757) born today… The rather wonderful Walsall New Art Gallery has a collection of Blake's illustrations, an...

Two of them, anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving… but why do Yankees and Canucks celebrate on different days?

It's been a long and hard week, though all my teaching has been fun: Twelfth Night  again, discourse analysis with the Research Methods ...

Yes, the results of the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards are in and the winners are: Rachel Johnson, for "a mounting, Wagnerian cr...

Jon Henley in today's Guardian  covers the rise and (gentle) fall of slow blogging. It's a nice idea - post something infrequently ...

… Ferdinand de Saussure, 1857-1913, father of structural linguistics and thus of all the good bits of literary theory. Without hell, there c...

While I'm in the mood for pictures, here are a couple from my walk up the Cheshire Matterhorn. There are plenty of landscapes over at my...

My photos of Chou Romanesco aren't perhaps quite as good as that posted earlier, but I'm glad I took them. Here are a couple - the r...

Alex Ross over at Therestisnoise  has posted a few moments of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel . If this doesn't convince you of the ...

Walking on Saturday was stunning - from Macclesfield's finest delicatessen where I bought hare and venison pie, up Shutlingsloe, across ...

It's time for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Award (for bad sex in fiction, so you can't nominate your exes). I always enjoy th...

Unless it's actually snowing tomorrow, I'm going up the Cheshire Matterhorn : it's said to be bleak and steep. So far it's D...

He's discovered that he's on the BNP membership list…

Still  no books in the post today, but I did get a rather lovely pair of Doctor Marten  shoes.

Peter Mandelson?

Some colleagues have just received anonymous text messages naming the alleged killers of Baby P. It's little more than a lynch mob (and ...

I'm on the third Anne of Green Gables  book, Anne of the Island . It suffers in comparison with the first two slightly because the plot...

The other excitement of the day, at least for me, was receiving two Northern Picture Library CDs in the post - post-Field Mice jangly guita...

This BNP membership list just gets more and more fun by the minute. I've checked my area, my friends' hometowns and old schoolchums ...