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It’s that time of year again: there’s a chill in the air, the sun barely shows its face, and the leaves are just golden memories long since carried away by the wind. A great time, in fact, to recall some of the outstanding non-fiction books that have landed on my desk this year. (more…)
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In the 1920s and 30s, Morris “Moe” Berg was a Major League Baseball player. He started out with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1923 and finished in 1939 with the Boston Red Sox. Despite the length of his career, by all accounts he was nothing special as a baseball player. (more…)
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A few days ago I went on a walk with my partner through the water meadows not far from our home. It was a beautiful day, one of the few in recent months when it didn’t rain. We let the course of the river guide our feet. The water beside us was as clear as crystal. Fish flickered among the green weeds.
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“Look, Dimitri, you know how we’ve always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb?”
It’s a classic moment in movie history: President Merkin Muffley (aka Peter Sellers) has just called the Soviet Premier on the telephone to tell him that in the next hour, 34 US bombers will each drop 40 megatons of H-bombs onto his country. As the Premier delivers a withering blast of Marxist-Leninist abuse down the phone line, Muffley looks pained: “Well, how do you think I feel about this?”
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When Albert Einstein died in 1955 his brain was removed, apparently for medical research. What is less well known is that his ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams, also cut out the great physicist’s eyes.
“The whole thing took about 20 minutes,” he said later. “I just needed scissors and forceps.” (more…)
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I have to admit it: The Lord of The Rings was one of my favourite reads as a child. By the age of thirteen I’d ploughed through it three times in total. I can still remember the pure escapist bliss of reading it while lying in a hammock beneath the fruit trees in our Essex garden during the summer holidays (no school!), following the hobbits on every step of their travels through Middle Earth.
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There are two new beginnings in my life.
The first flower has opened in our new garden.
We recently left the Big Smoke (London) in search of time, space, and a garden. Maybe this camellia augurs well. Maybe we too can put down roots here…
And the second beginning?
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