Brisbane is all clean blue skies and crisp tall buildings and newness. Australia seems even newer and more plastic than ever after Paris, although that is also why it's so lovely here. They call this winter - ha! We have been out sunbathing all day. The disparate members of our family are gradually coming together, which is always a huge pleasure ( Read more... )

There is a great photo in today's Le Monde magazine concerning Nabokov's Lolita and its reception in France. I really wish I could post it but I don't have a scanner here and I can't find a copy on teh interwebz. It's from 5 July 1960 and shows a group of actresses protesting in front of the Académie Française - not about the book's content but ( Read more... )

I want to write today, but so far the urge has been unhelpfully sublimated into reading, looking words up, and now posting here.

First of all, did anyone else see Red Riding? It was amazing, the best thing I've seen on British telly for a very long time - although so very dark that it gave me creepy dreams all last night. Oh, and filmed in the ( Read more... )

I wonder how old the idea of werewolves is. I guess I could check this sort of thing online, but really, does every train of thought have to end in Wikipedia now?

I ask because I'm reading Marie de France at the moment. She is very interesting and very readable, and one of her lais, ‘Bisclavret’, is about what we would call a werewolf, and was ( Read more... )

Did anyone see the latest episode of QI this weekend?  I swear to god, either John Lloyd has just been reading Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, or else hobnobofjoy  read my post about it and passed on the details, because every damn question was lifted straight from the book!

It was the perfect source, I guess, for a France-themed episode.  They even had ( Read more... )

Two memes both stolen from used_songs :

01. Answer each of the questions below the cut using the Flickr search engine.
02. Choose a photo from the first three pages.
03. Copy the URL of your favorite photos here.
04. Then share with the world.

( disappointingly uninspiring montage )

From LanguageHat - a perfectly-chosen poem from Langston Hughes (I had never seen this one before!).

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-
Let it be that great ( Read more... )

I have written before, I'm almost certain, about Carol Ann Duffy, my favourite modern poet and in my view the best British poet around.  One of her most anthologised pieces has just been caught up in the current media hysteria over UK knife crime.  "Education for Leisure" is really a poem of the 80s, a poem about kids with no future in Thatcher's ( Read more... )

1. I rang a friend at BBC Online last week to ask why we have to spell Radovan Karadžić's name as "Karadzic" on all our websites. The answer: because it has to go on Ceefax, which can't handle diacritical marks. Bah. What's everyone else's excuse? Not a single newspaper that I can see is printing it with accents, which I suppose is not the end of ( Read more... )

Because I spent my formative years wandering half-drunk around as many foreign countries as I could get to, I have always loved books and poems about travel and what it means.  One of the reasons I fell so hugely in love with Old English when I first started learning it is that they kept alive this Germanic heroic tradition of deep metaphysical ( Read more... )