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Index: Noted elsewhere

· From the Windsor family archives: the near-queen and the silly prince.

Friday, 29 April 2011

It is well attested that Wallis tried to stop Edward from abdicating. She wasn’t in love with him, didn’t want to be queen and was horrified when she realised how much he was giving up.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

· Oscar Wilde’s ‘Picture of Dorian Gray’ – full-length at last.

Thursday, 28 April 2011

Deciding that the novel as it stood contained “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an exception to”, and assuring his employer Craige Lippincott that he would make the book “acceptable to the most fastidious taste”, Stoddart also removed references to Gray’s female lovers as his “mistresses”.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Excerpts & Passages, The Fortnightly Review of Books | | Comments (0)

· The pleasures of theories conspiratorial denied.

Wednesday, 27 April 2011

That’s how far things have gone. In addition to anxiety caused by the border tension, Thais are being told that everything is not what they think it is. Last week’s satellite malfunction that resulted in blank TV screens nationwide was purportedly not a technical error, but a well-executed warning to the Thai military that if they plot a coup, they won’t have any channel to broadcast it on.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

· OMG, there’s actual religiosity in Trollope’s spirituality?

Monday, 25 April 2011

Liturgy is where art and community life meet. Where spirit is not thought but made flesh through hands, knees, and vocal chords. In worship the stuff of art is offered up in the name of the community, not the ego of the artist—or the clergy.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Theology | | Comments (0)

· Going to Easter services with a haruspex named James Joyce.

Friday, 22 April 2011

THE MIRACLES OF THE season vary over time. One century’s miracles are another’s footnote. What could be more miraculous than standing at an Orthodox Paschal liturgy in a northern Italian port city next to an Irish sceptic named James Joyce? By R. J. SCHORK [Journal of Modern Greek Studies] – In the autumn of 1904 […]

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Theology | | Comments (0)

· Three men, two kids, and an immoral US college admissions racket.

Friday, 22 April 2011

When do minuscule acceptance rates stop being something to boast about and start becoming signs of archaic, insulated, overly wealthy institutions that are badly out of step with their times?

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Psychology, Philosophy & Education | | Comments (0)

· The codex, in your hand, perfect-bound, in four minutes. Next?

Monday, 18 April 2011

Many of us worry about a decline in deep, reflective, cover-to-cover reading. We deplore the shift to blogs, snippets, and tweets. In the case of research, we might concede that word searches have advantages, but we refuse to believe that they can lead to the kind of understanding that comes with the continuous study of an entire book. Is it true, however, that deep reading has declined, or even that it always prevailed?

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

· Event: Smile! You’re on candid kino. Vertov at the MOMA. (And here.)

Friday, 15 April 2011

Dziga Vertov, of course, considered his films to be documentaries, records of actuality, but all his work reflected his very personal, highly poetic vision of Soviet ‘reality,’ a vision he maintained throughout his life, long after the dustbin of soviet history had claimed him, too.

Also filed in Art & Architecture, Chronicle & Notices, Film, Television, Video & Theatre | | Comments (0)

· Dostoevsky’s truth vs the Tsar’s fiction.

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Were I to choose any one single episode in the life of a modern writer to fit the “truth is stranger than fiction” bill, it would be a central incident in the life of Dostoevsky that took place in December 1849.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Poetry & Fiction, The Fortnightly Review of Books | | Comments (0)

· Shopping for miracles with Buddha on the brain.

Tuesday, 12 April 2011

When the Buddhist goes shopping he feels like we all do: unified, in control, and unchanged from moment to moment. The way things feel becomes suspect.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Science, Medicine & Technology, Theology | | Comments (0)

· David Cameron’s non-winning ways.

Sunday, 10 April 2011

By reaching a swift understanding with Mr Clegg, himself all too well aware that he was the election’s big loser, Mr Cameron ushered in the age of compromise and tactical retreat that has marked the last 11 months.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

· Stopping by Fred Nietzsche’s house.

Friday, 8 April 2011

The time he spent there appears to have been peaceful, even if, according to a Nietzsche Haus curator, children would fill his umbrella with stones so that they’d fall on his head when he opened it.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices, History & Travel | | Comments (1)

· Ink-stained hippie wretches and their far-out newspapers.

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

The medium has changed (from small magazines, to cheaply printed local community newspapers to Twitter), but the message is the same: Social movements need organic forms of communication because without it, they die.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices, Politics & Culture | | Comments (0)

· Want to improve your quality of life? Get a better writer.

Saturday, 2 April 2011

The truth of a life is often far more interesting, often because it flies in the face of known facts and delivers to us a man (or woman, of course) a reader would like to believe in.

Also filed in Books & Publishing, Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)

· First ask: what would Mr Rogers do?

Thursday, 31 March 2011

Whatever we think of the politics and prohibitions of modern morality, there is little draw to them. We lie dumb and desensitized in a picturesque moral landscape and dream in browns and grays.

Also filed in Chronicle & Notices | | Comments (0)
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