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Orthanc bought for £1
It's interesting to skim YouTube currently for oddments that didn't make it into the The Lord of the Rings film triology for editorial or timing reasons. One (above) is the death of Saruman....
View ArticleExeter hosts National Dialect Day 2013
A cross-post from the Devon History Society: I've just been in correspondence with Bill Murray about this year's National Dialect Day. The weekend event - the fifth - will be hosted in Exeter.From the...
View ArticleRenato Borghetti
EmilyRuy Gomez, a Brazilian reader who noticed that I like accordion music here, kindly sent me some links to to the work of the Brazilian folk musician and composer Renato Borghetti. See his official...
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The Diamond Age
1996 Penguin edition coverAnother recommendation. Neal Stephenson's 1995 SF novel The Diamond Age is by no means a new book, but for some reason I'd never read it until I borrowed a copy from the...
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Poets of the Wight
A while back - New Maxwell Gray photo - I mentioned that Brighstone Library had kindly sourced me a clipping from the then-unfindable 1933 book Poets of the Wight (Charles John Arnell, County Press,...
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Philip Stanhope Worsley: naff retouching
Philip Stanhope Worsley, from Poets of the WightI was wondering at the weirdness of this photo of the poet Philip Stanhope Worsley in the previously-mentioned book Poets of the Wight. Where are his...
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Sherbrook now
View Larger MapClare was off at a writers' meeting today, so I took myself off chine-spotting. (Chines, as I've mentioned previously, are the miniature coastal ravines typical of the soft sedimentary...
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Addometer
Ptak Science Books just featured a very nice post - Beautiful Techno-Art & Invention: Circular Adding Machines, 1850-1900 - featuring technical illustrations from US patents for various rotary...
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Devonshire scenery in verse and prose
I've apologised before to Wayland Wordsmith for poaching his blog topics, but very often our blogs interweave out of a kind of 'convergence of evolution' from having similar interests. His recent post...
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MWDEU gone from Google Books!
I just had a major bibliographic disappointment: I find that Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, which for years has been available in full on Google Books, has been removed.Alongside the...
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... in the Isle of Wight #1
I always find it interesting to pursue obscure novels about places I know, and I just ran into a 'possible': the anonymously written In the Isle of Wight: A Novel. It turns out not to be findable...
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... in the Isle of Wight #2
I previously mentioned two of a quartet of unfamiliar travelogues of the Isle of Wight: see ... in the Isle of Wight #1 for the 1884 Rambles in the Isle of Wight by John Gwilliam, and the 1846 Owen...
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Taiblet's awfu' guid
I can never see the word "tablet" without it raising somewhere in my mind this kind of tablet, the traditional Scottish confection - a buttery semi-crystalline fudge - that probably sprang from the...
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The Bindon Landslip of 1839
view from Great Bindon - Coneybeare and Buckland monographlow-res image from Lyme Regis Museum scanIt's probably obvious that I have a bit of an obsession with the coastal landslip terrain of the...
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Habitation One: guilty pleasures
This is one for Felix Grant, who commented recently,One of my favourite guilty pleasures is reading potted reviews of one and two star rated films.A conversation elsewhere, that touched on dystopian...
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Dunscombe: Spring is in the air
View Larger MapYesterday it started out misty, but the sun burned through by lunchtime to make a fresh warmish afternoon, the first of the year. I went on a walk near Sidmouth with Ralph (of Wayland...
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To see Swainston
Swainston ManorThis weekend Clare and I visited The Silence of Dean Maitland territory. Our original plan was to go to Calbourne - "Malbourne" in Maxwell Gray's novel - but we had a rapid rethink on...
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Larking about
Portsmouth Harbour: HMS Warriors, with Gosport's 1960s flats beyondOn Friday we were in Portsmouth, en route to the Isle of Wight, and despite it being a dismally overcast day, we had a brief look at...
View ArticleStanding room only
A minor enduring meme of the 20th century has been the idea that the entire population of the world would fit on the Isle of Wight. Depending on assumptions, population growth appears to have made this...
View ArticleFrank Herbert's Dune
trailer for Frank Herbert's DuneI mentioned my liking for Dune - both the book and the 1984 David Lynch movie - a while back (see Dune, 10 October 2008). But for some reason, I only just got around to...
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