Category Archives: books

A Dance to the Music of Time

[Warning: this is a long post. It’s so long I can’t find its tail to pin a donkey on it.]

My friend Katy has finally finished reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. She’s written a blog post about her thoughts of it. Despite being a deeply dyed literarist she isn’t very enthusiastic, so more power to her for having stuck the course. She’s also worried about what I mights say!

Well there’s no need to worry. I may be one of the progenitors of the Anthony Powell Society (and its Hon. Secretary) but I am also a realist. Dance, indeed any of Powell’s work, isn’t for everyone. Dance, especially, you have to “get”. And either you do or you don’t; many people don’t get it. No shame in that; I don’t get Tolkein.

So, no, I’m not going to try to change Katy’s mind, or tell her she’s wrong. There are no right and wrong answers. Katy’s (anyone’s) reaction to the work is as valid as mine. Yes because of Katy’s Eng. Lit. academic background she should be able to read anything more easily than I can — and appreciate it for its style, or lack thereof — but she is still allowed to know what she does/doesn’t like; as are you.

What I am going to do is to try to pick up on a number of Katy’s observations about Dance and try to put them into some sort of context to help others better understand the work.

At this point I should say that anyone who wants a potted summary of the 12 novels can find one on the AP Society website; and anyone who wants to buy them can find the current paperbacks on Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.


Nicolas Poussin’s, A Dance to the Music of Time which inspired Powll’s novel sequence
of the same title. The painting hangs in the Wallace Collection, London.

OK, so what points does Katy make and which appear to have hindered her enjoyment?

  1. The book is hard to read because of the historical background.
  2. It is slow going.
  3. There isn’t any plot and the books go nowhere.
  4. It covers a lengthy timespan.
  5. Why does Powell persist with a horrible character like Widmerpool?
  6. We learn nothing about the narrator Jenkins and his family.
  7. The women are poorly drawn.
  8. Evelyn Waugh is a better read.
  9. The last book, Hearing Secret Harmonies, is the weakest of the series.

Any comments one makes to these questions are, naturally, inextricably intertwined, so I’m going to write some narrative rather than try to answer each question in a standalone fashion. So here goes.

Interestingly women do seem to have more of a problem with Powell than men do. And there’s a good reason for this. Powell was born in 1905 into an upper middle-class family. He had an Edwardian, all male, public school (Eton and Oxford) upbringing in a world where men’s relationships with women were very different from the way they are today. Indeed the whole of society was different. This is one of the things which, as Katy perceives, makes the work hard for modern audiences. It is also one of the reasons why, I think, women predominantly find the female characters poorly drawn. This isn’t “wrong”, it is just Powell’s very different perspective on women and the world; a world which was different from the one we have been brought up in.

But there’s something about Powell’s very different view of this very different world which is one of the books’ great strengths. It covers a huge timespan: from the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 (a flashback at the start of book 6, The Kindly Ones) to around 1971. It is detailed in places; detail which is inexorably accurate. It covers times and echelons of society many of us will never have truly encountered but which Powell did — much of the work is based on and drawn around his own experiences although it is decidedly not autobiographical, nor only about toffs, as often supposed. All of this makes Dance a tremendous piece of social history — something which scholars are now beginning to appreciate.

That doesn’t make for an easy or fast-moving read for one does need to have some understanding of that history, and to concentrate, to be able to make best sense of the book. And the better one understands the history, the more one gets from the book and the more one appreciates its humour. This detail; this lack of understanding of English society and 20th century social history; is why one of my dreams is to be able to create a complete annotation of Dance, in the way that Martin Gardner created The Annotated Alice. Without such a resource much of the detail, interest and subtlety of Dance is almost bound to get lost. A lot of this detail one can read over without fully understanding it if one has the background in English society. As an example how many of us really know what is a “regiment of the line”? But we have a rough idea what it is about and that’s enough at a first level. But if one gets the nuances of the detail the whole work becomes so much more interesting. However it confuses the non-English reader and the less educationally mature reader. And that’s a great shame as there is much to enjoy in Dance.

For yes, Dance is at times comic: in an understated English way. Powell doesn’t do stand-up, laugh-out-loud farce set pieces in the way that his friend and contemporary Evelyn Waugh does. Think of Waugh’s war trilogy and Apthorpe’s “thunder-box” or the whole of Black Mischief. Powell is more subtle and takes a drier, more askance look at what’s happening, making humour from everyday situations and his characters turns of phrase.

Being contemporaries, Powell is so often compared with Waugh, which is something misleading and unfair to both writers. They are birds of completely different plumage. It’s a bit like comparing apples and smoked haddock. Waugh writes books with stories and plots and is good at farce. Powell is more discursive and descriptive; more in the style of Dickens or Walter Scott, or as often stated, Proust. This is in part what makes Dance slow going for some people. But in my view Powell is a much superior writer, technically. Powell and Waugh are trying to do very different things; nevertheless they were genuine admirers of each others’ work. Which you prefer to read depends how one is constituted.

All of this is why there is a perception that Dance doesn’t have a plot and goes nowhere. I see the logic here. There is no well defined story line or giant denouement with an “everyone lives happily ever after” ending. And that is the whole point. Why? Because that’s the way life is. And what is Powell doing? He’s writing about life. The way life twists and turns. About how people weave in and out of one’s life at unexpected times and in unexpected ways, like the dancers in Poussin’s pa
inting. About how people connect to each other also at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. Life isn’t tidy and for the vast majority it doesn’t have a pre-defined plot or story line.

This too answers the question of “Why Widmerpool?”. The answer, again, is because that’s how life is. We all have people who weave in and out of our lives, who we maybe dislike or who are horrible characters. That’s how people are and how life is. Powell uses this for great comic effect. Widmerpool is a sort of heroic anti-hero. Or is he an anti-heroic hero? Whichever. The novels wouldn’t work with a nice, well-behaved, “every-girl-would-like-to-take-him-to-bed” style hero. Try substituting Waugh’s Charles Ryder or Sebastian Flyte for Widmerpool. It just wouldn’t work!

Another reason there isn’t a well defined plot is that, as Powell himself says somewhere, the novels are written as being like a series of stories told over the dinner table. If you like, Jenkins the narrator is telling stories about his life and about the way in which Widmerpool has wandered in and out of this life. The stories are set off by this image (at the very beginning) of the men with a brazier mending the road and culminate 12 books later with a reprise of that same scene. (We’ll ignore for now the debate over whether the start and end really are the same scene or not.) But again that’s why there is no well defined plot in the conventional sense: it is a set of meandering stories which, as we all know from having talked over dinner, often do indeed go nowhere.

But there are plots, or at least story lines. Widmerpool himself is the main plot. There is an army/war story line. There’s another around the interaction of the literary/arts world with the business world. And overarching even the Widmerpool leitmotif there is one about power: men of thought vs men of the will.

This is also why we learn little about Jenkins himself and his family. It isn’t relevant to the stories being told which are largely observational about other people. Just as Powell is often criticised for not dealing more with the Katyn Massacre or the Holocaust. It isn’t that Powell denies them or belittles them. It is merely that they aren’t relevant to the stories he’s telling.

Which brings me to the final point, about the final novel: that Hearing Secret Harmonies is the weakest book. I have to be honest and say I agree; I too think it is the weakest book. But many do not agree. Indeed I have had exactly this debate with Eng. Lit. academics and other deep thinking persons such as Lord Gowrie. HSH doesn’t work for me; it isn’t the life I lived through. But, again, there is a good reason for this. I was a student at the time HSH is set; I was there; I lived through the “swinging sixties” and early ’70s as a student. Powell was not there; he was already in his 60s and looking at what was happening with the eyes of an uncomprehending older generation. We should not expect him to see and understand those times in the same way I do. That doesn’t mean I’m right and he’s wrong. We have different views of the world. It’s like me, now in my 60s, trying to understand the culture of the present generation of students: I don’t understand it (and arguably nor should I) in the way those living the life do; I’m looking at it through totally the other end of a telescope from them. This is a part of what makes HSH feel a somewhat contrived ending. But then again I know many who would not agree with that either. That’s why, I think, HSH doesn’t work well for me. Against that the war trilogy does work well and they are my favourite three of the 12 books, as they are for many readers.

I’ll finish by saying what I often say to people asking about whether to read Dance. First of all don’t be off-put by the fact it is 12 novels. Each novel is essentially standalone, although some are better at it than others. Read one, or two, and see if you like it. If you are a person who must read a sequence of novels in sequence then you have to start at the beginning with A Question of Upbringing; but be prepared to persevere as I find QU the slowest of the books. If you are someone who needs to be captivated then start by reading one of the books from the second trilogy or from the war (third) trilogy depending on whether you’re more interested in the swinging thirties or the war.

But most importantly if you’re a serious reader and you haven’t tried Powell, do so. There’s so much more in Dance than a mere 12 novels. I believe Powell is one of (if not the) best writers of the 20th century, and greatly under-rated. And he was a lot more than “just a
novelist”!

Blue Poodles

Book titles can be an endless source of fascination. What makes a good title? When does an amusing title work and when does it just become droll. Why do publishers change your amusing or off the wall working title into something more descriptive but boring? Isn’t Blue Poodles a much better title than The Semiotic Use of Color in Californian Dog Parlours?

But one always wonders how many of the odd titles one comes across are real and how many are accidental. Do publishers and authors really have no sense of the ridiculous? Or are they actually out to lunch?

Grubbing around in the intertubes the other day, the way one does, I found that Horace Bent, the pseudonymous diarist of The Bookseller magazine, has been collecting, and awarding an annual prize for, the oddest book titles.

While not all appeal to my strangely warped sense of the ridiculous, many are brilliant. The list includes:

  • Managing a Dental Practice: The Genghis Khan Way
  • Baboon Metaphysics
  • Strip and Knit with Style
  • The Industrial Vagina
  • The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification
  • Tattoed [sic] Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan: Magic Medicine Symbols in Silk, Stone, Wood and Flesh
  • Bombproof Your Horse
  • Living with Crazy Buttocks
  • First You Take a Leek
  • Whose Bottom? A Lift-the-Flap Book
  • Guide to Eskimo Rolling
  • American Bottom Archaeology
  • Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality
  • Optical Chick Sexing
  • Penetrating Wagner’s Ring
  • Waterproofing Your Child

You can find the full list here.

More School Reading

Following on from my post of earlier, talking at lunch with Noreen has helped recall a few more things I read at school.

As plays we read Pygmalion and I think Toad of Toad Hall .

The poetry selections also included Alfred Noyes’ The Highwayman, Browning’s How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix, Kipling’s A Smuggler’s Song and William Cowper’s The Diverting History of John Gilpin. Doubtless Wordsworth (those bloody daffodils!), Tennyson and Christina Rossetti crept in too.

In I think the second year we had a single “reading lesson” each week with Bob Roberts who was the Deputy Head. In this we read a set book and there was some discussion of it. The books tended to be slightly lighter weight than in mainstream English lessons and I know this is where we read The Thirty-Nine Steps. This may also have included some Sherlock Holmes, but I’m not at all certain about that.

Somewhere along the way I think we must have read George Orwell’s Animal Farm because I can’t think I would have read it otherwise, although I do remember reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World at my father’s suggestion.

I also remember that in the third year (so age 13-14), we had a weekly reading lesson in the school library where (when we weren’t being taught to use a library; boring; I’d know this for several years!) we could read anything we liked from the shelves. I tried reading War and Peace. Needless to say I didn’t get very far.

There was, of course, other stuff one was exposed to via the school play, house plays and the choir. One of the pieces we regularly sang in the choir was Benjamin Britten’s setting of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno which is something else I still love.

For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.

For he is of the tribe of Tiger.
For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger.

For God has blessed him in the variety of his movements.
For, though he cannot fly, he is an excellent clamberer.
For his motions upon the face of the earth are more than any other quadruped.
For he can tread to all the measures upon the music.
For he can swim for life.
For he can creep.

In my final year the school play was The Insect Play by the Brothers Čapek. A very curious beast, but actually quite entertaining and single acts from this were also quite a favourite of the house plays. Maybe the house plays (each of the four houses put on a single act play for two nights each December; all four on the same evening) was where I came across Toad of Toad Hall.

There must have been more that is now far beyond recall. Sadly so much of it was, as Katy observed, so unutterably miserable. And she was doing school English 20-some years after me when one would have hoped things might have improved.

Wat I did Read at Skool

Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.

The very deep did rot: O Christ!
That ever this should be!
Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs
Upon the slimy sea.

About, about, in reel and rout
The death-fires danced at night;
The water, like a witch’s oils,
Burnt green, and blue, and white.

My friend Katy’s post the other day about what children read at school got me to thinking about what I had to read at grammar school.

Well, sort of.

It was more like what I didn’t read.

Because I have always been a slow reader (am I 10% dyslexic?) I never managed to keep up with what we were (supposed to be) reading. If we were given homework of “Read the next chapter of [insert book]” which was supposed to take half an hour, it invariably took me well over an hour — sometimes two — and I still didn’t get all the nuances I was supposed to. So I was always trying to finish reading chapter 3 while the class were discussing chapter 5 (which of course I’d not read).

Add to that a level of terminal boredom with just about everything we read — I just couldn’t see the point of this tedium — and it’s a wonder I managed to pass GCE English Literature at all! Nevertheless I was at the top of the second set for English. I wanted to go into the top set (they did more interesting stuff) but rightly (in retrospect) my teacher said I couldn’t and that I would struggle there.

So what did I have to read?

I know that for ‘O’ level I did:

  • CS Forrester, The Gun (about which I remember less than nothing)
  • Shakespeare, Julius Caesar
  • And some collection of poetry including a load of crappy ballads (Sir Patrick Spens, et al.) which I still hate with a vengeance; Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I loved; Keats’s The Eve of St Agnes, which I didn’t understand; Masefield’s Cargoes, which is delightful; and I remember not what else.

The top set for English did some of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales instead of the CS Forrester. My teacher was right; I would have struggled with this however much I wanted to do it.

Lower down the school we did most of the classics, which I hated without exception. I recall having to read:

  • Dickens: Great Expectations, Pickwick Papers and A Christmas Carol
  • Hardy: I think Far from the Madding Crowd and probably The Mayor of Casterbridge
  • Buchan: The Thirty-Nine Steps
  • Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre
  • Shakespeare: Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice
  • And a continual selection of poetry mostly from Palgrave’s godforsaken Golden Treasury which included delights like Hiawatha and Sorab and Rustum (yeuch!).

What else we read I have no clue. It has all been long forgotten, which is probably as well.

Looking back about the only bits I at all enjoyed were Pickwick Papers, the first half of Julius Caesar, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Cargoes.

To this day, with the exception of the above handful, I cannot read any of this stuff and haven’t returned to it. School successfully destroyed all the so-called classics for me permanently. In fact I can, even now, read very little fiction or poetry; what I have read and enjoyed I have found for myself since leaving, and despite, school. I find life-writing and non-fiction much more amenable.

I’m still a very slow reader and have never properly mastered speed-reading, which can be a major handicap.

Ten Things of 2011: The Summary

Back in January I set out to write ten things each month so that at the end of this year you knew 120 more things about me: things I like and things I dislike. Just for the record, and seeing as it's the end of the year, here is the complete list …

Things I Like

  1. Sex
  2. Cats
  3. Steam Trains
  4. Koi
  5. Nudity
  6. Roses
  7. Beer
  8. Sunshine
  9. Photography
  10. Tea
  11. Beaujolais Nouveau
  12. Fresh Snow
Things I Won't Do

  1. Play Golf
  2. Sailing
  3. Ballroom Dancing
  4. Bungee Jumping
  5. Wearing DJ/Tuxedo
  6. Wear Jacket and Tie on Holiday
  7. Parachute
  8. Eat Sheep's Eyes or Tripe
  9. Take any more Exams
  10. Halloween
  11. Plumbing
  12. Go Horse Racing

Something I want to do

  1. Visit Japan
  2. Take a Trip on Orient Express
  3. Expand my Family History
  4. Travel Wick/Thurso to Penzence by Train
  5. Have Acupuncture
  6. Have a Nudist Holiday
  7. Visit Scilly Isles
  8. Win £2M
  9. Get Rid of my Depression
  10. Fly on Flightdeck of an Airliner
  11. Visit Norway & Sweden
  12. Write a Book
Blogs I Like

  1. Katyboo
  2. Emily Nagoski :: Sex Nerd
  3. The Magistrates Blog
  4. Art by Ren Adams
  5. Whoopee
  6. Aetiology
  7. Not Exactly Rocket Science
  8. Norn's Notebook
  9. The Loom
  10. Bad Science
  11. Cocktail Party Physics
  12. Postsecret

Books I Like

  1. Anthony Powell; A Dance to the Music of Time
  2. Brad Warner; Sex, Sin & Zen
  3. Mary Roach; Stiff
  4. Lewis Carroll; Alice in Wonderland
  5. Brown, Fergusson, Lawrence & Lees; Tracks & Signs
    of the Birds of Britain & Europe
  6. John Guillim, A Display of Heraldrie
  7. Diary of Samuel Pepys
  8. AN Wilson, After the Victorians
  9. Florence Greenberg; Jewish Cookery
  10. Nick McCamley; Secret Underground Cities
  11. Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy
  12. Charles Nicholls; The Reckoning
Music I Like

  1. Pink Floyd, Wish You Were Here
  2. Beatles, Abbey Road
  3. Yes, Close to the Edge
  4. Monteverdi, 1610 Vespers
  5. Caravan, In the Land of Pink & Grey
  6. Carl Orff, Carmina Burana
  7. Amanda Palmer, Map of Tasmania
  8. William Byrd, The Battell
  9. Pink Floyd, Learning to Fly
  10. Moody Blues, Octave
  11. Handel, Messiah
  12. JS Bach, Christmas Oratorio

Food I Like

  1. Curry
  2. Pasta
  3. Sausage
  4. Butter Beans
  5. Whitebait
  6. Avocado
  7. Cheese
  8. Smoked Fish, especially Eel
  9. Chips
  10. Swiss Chard
  11. Pizza
  12. Treacle Tart
Food & Drink I Dislike

  1. Egg Custard
  2. Carrots
  3. Sweetcorn
  4. Pernod
  5. Sheep's Eyes
  6. Green Tea
  7. Tapioca
  8. Absinthe
  9. Marron Glacé
  10. Milk
  11. Sweet Potatoes
  12. Butternut Squash
Words I Like

  1. Cunt
  2. Crenellate
  3. Merkin
  4. Merhari
  5. Amniomancy
  6. Vespiary
  7. Numpty
  8. Halberd
  9. Verisimilitude
  10. Persiflage
  11. Mendicant
  12. Antepenultimate

Quotes I Like

  1. If you don't concern yourself with your wife's cat, you will lose something irretrievable between you. [Haruki Murakami]
  2. When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives. [Joseph Campbell]
  3. The purpose of our lives is to be happy. [Dalai Lama]
  4. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. [Flannery O’Connor]
  5. I like small furry animals — as long as they're tasty. [Lisa Jardine]
  6. The covers of this book are too far apart. [Ambrose Bierce]
  7. It will pass, sir, like other days in the army. [Anthony Powell]
  8. The gap between strategic rhetoric and operational reality remains dangerously wide. [Prof. Gordon Hewitt]
  9. Pro bono publico, nil bloody panico. [Rear-Admiral Sir Morgan Morgan-Giles]
  10. Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And East is East and West is West and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste more like prunes than a rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know? [Groucho Marx]
  11. The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. [JBS Haldane]
  12. If we don't change our direction we're liable to end up where we're going. [Chinese Proverb]

Ten Things – December

The final episode of my monthly series of “Ten Things” for 2011. Each month during the year I’ve listed one thing from each of ten categories which have remained the same each month. So today completes the ten lists of twelve things about me.

  1. Something I Like: Fresh Snow
  2. Something I Won’t Do: Go Horse Racing
  3. Something I Want To Do: Write a Book
  4. A Blog I Like: Postsecret
  5. A Book I Like: Charles Nicholls, The Reckoning
  6. Some Music I Like: JS Bach, Weihnachtsoratorium
  7. A Food I Like: Treacle Tart
  8. A Food or Drink I Dislike: Butternut Squash
  9. A Word I Like: Antepenultimate
  10. A Quote I Like: If we don’t change our direction we’re liable to end up where we’re going. [Chinese Proverb]

Quotes of the Week

The usual eclectic mix. Firstly something dear to my heart …

A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.
[Alan Bennett]

So long as a judge keeps silent his reputation for wisdom and impartiality remains unassailable: but every utterance which he makes in public except in the course of the actual performance of his judicial duties, must necessarily bring him within the focus of criticism. [It would] be inappropriate for the judiciary to be associated with any series of talks or anything which can be fairly interpreted as entertainment.
[Lord Goddard, Lord Chief Justice, 1955]

I suppose one shouldn’t expect anything less po-faced coming out if the 1950s, but oh, dear we are on our dignity aren’t we! Next something I’ve long suspected, from someone who should know …

Science is organized common sense. Philosophy is organized piffle.
[Bertrand Russell, philosopher and mathematician]

There are three faithful friends:
– An old wife
– A shaggy dog
– And ready money

[Thoughts of Angel]

Slightly dodgy ground there, methinks! And finally …

The best of all stratagems is to know when to quit.
[Thoughts of Angel]

Reasons to be Grateful

This week I’ve been reading Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot. This is a self-help book but with a big difference. As the book blurb says

Welcome to the new science of rapid change. In 59 Seconds psychologist Richard Wiseman exposes modern-day mind myths promoted by the self-help industry, and outlines quick and quirky techniques that help people to achieve their aims in minutes, not months.

And from New Scientist

This is a self-help book, but with a difference: almost everything in it is underpinned by peer-reviewed and often fascinating research. It could actually help you be a little happier, perform better at interviews, procrastinate less, improve your relationships, reduce your stress levels and be a better parent

And it does exactly what it says on the tin!

In the final chapter Wiseman briefly summarises ten things which he could explain in under a minute (the challenge he set himself at the start of the book) and which could make a difference:

  1. Develop the gratitude attitude
  2. Place a picture of a baby in your wallet
  3. Hang a mirror in your kitchen
  4. Buy a pot plant for the office
  5. Touch people lightly on the upper arm
  6. Wite about your relationship
  7. Deal with potential liars by closing your eyes and asking for an email
  8. Praise children’s effort over ability
  9. Visualise your self doing, not achieving
  10. Consider your legacy

No they aren’t all inherently obvious. And I’m not going to try to explain them here — you’ll just have to splash out a few quid on the paperback.

Do they work. Well clearly Wiseman thinks they do. I don’t know, although I follow the logic behind most of them. So what I’m going to do is try a little experiment of my own here: and that’s try the first on Wiseman’s list which he summarises as:

Develop the gratitude attitude
Having people list three things that they are grateful for in life, or three events that have gone especially well over the past week, can significantly increase their level of happiness for about a month. This, in turn, can cause them to be more optimistic about the future and improve their physical health.

So each weekend I’ll write a short post about at least three (I’ll aim for five) things which have made me happy or which I’m grateful for over the last week. And I’ll aim to do this trough to at least the end of 2012. There’s no control group so it will be hard to know how well it succeeds, other than maybe my qualitative perceptions — but then that is at least half of what it’s all about. Anthony Powell attributes to his character General Conyers in Books Do Furnish a Room:

The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.

So here are my first five things which have made me happy/grateful over the last week:

  1. An excellent Anthony Powell Annual Lecture last evening from Prof. Vernon Bogdanor
  2. Noreen
  3. A stunning flower on our Hibiscus
  4. Sunshine
  5. Beaujolais Nouveau

Links of the Week

A collection of the curious and interesting you may have missed. This week we have a selcetion of the eccentric and the scientific …

First up here are nine equations true (science) geeks should know — or at least pretend to know. No I’d never heard of some of them either!

Why is this cargo container emitting so much radiation? Seems fairly obvious to me but it clearly puzzled the Italians.

Science, philosophy and religion: which best offers us the tools to understand the world around us? Here’s the scientist’s view, which is much as expected but still interesting to read.

John Lennon’s tooth bought by Canadian dentist. FFS why?

And finally … They’re baffling but they’re rather splendid. Who left a tree and a coffin in the library?