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Official: Britons are most cultured Europeans :
Interviewees in the countries that made up the EU until its enlargement last year were asked if they had been to any one of a series of cultural events in the previous 12 months.
The British scored higher than the French, Germans and Italians in every category except sport. More than 60% of Britons said they were film-goers, compared with only 52% in the land of Renoir, Godard and Truffaut, and 49% of Britons claimed to have been to a library, compared with 27% in the homeland of Goethe.
And almost a third of Britons claimed to have been to a gallery or museum, compared with barely 20% of Italians.
Wittgenstein: neglected author of kiddie-lit?:
So exact and intense was the teacher in his methods that the villagers thought him mad. Yet he was devoted to their children. Realising that country pupils were too poor to afford spelling dictionaries, he sat down and wrote one for them.
Yesterday, nearly 80 years later, proofs of the 42-page guide annotated in the teacher's handwriting went on sale for £75,000. For it is rare and famous among collectors as Ludwig Wittgenstein's "other book" - only the second work published between hard covers in his lifetime by the thinker acknowledged as the pre-eminent genius of 20th century philosophy.
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Wittgenstein's dictionary is rich in the flavour of an unsparingly analytical mind. In the preface, he writes of his method of organising the word entries: "Each instance of clinging to a dogmatic principle leads to an arrangement that does not suit our purpose and has to be abandoned, even if this would make the author's work much easier. Rather, it is necessary to compromise again and again."
Extracts from the Preface to the Dictionary.
Kathryn Hughes reviews Barbara Caine's Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family:
Richard and his wife Jane had 10 surviving children, which was a lot for that time and class (Caine doesn't go into it, but these were the sort of people who knew about birth control and had no moral objections to using it). What this means, of course, is that a historical investigation can be set in play using the 10 little Stracheys as laboratory rats. Nearly 30 years divided the eldest from the youngest, so their life experience spanned from 1859, and the birth of Elinor, to 1968 when Pippa died. During that time each Strachey was obliged to come to terms with a series of epoch-marking events, from the end of empire to the trouncing of fascism, by way of female suffrage and the post-impressionist exhibitions of 1910 and 1912. Their different responses to these events - tempered by age and personal inclination - form a kind of ground plan for 100 years of British cultural experience.