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Little things I loathe No. 4: Bob Harris
Before I get to Bob, and I don’t actually loathe him per se, let me put my cards on the table. The Private Eye headline when John Peel died – “Man who played records on the wireless dies: a nation mourns” did strike a chord with me. I liked Peel, but couldn’t see why he…
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Shooting Fish in a Barrel
This is an easy target, I know, but I just can’t resist: Health and Safety. At my place of work, we recently had installed, at great expense, and over a long period of time, special fire safety doors to stop the spread of the fires which, of course, regularly break out… These doors are situated…
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Let’s grow up
Michael Bywater is always worth reading, and this piece is brilliant at exposing the way people are increasingly infantilised in today’s society.
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The last Mughal and a clash of civilisations
New Statesman – The last Mughal and a clash of civilisations This is fascinating, and demonstrates once more that we seem incapable of learning from history. By a melancholy coincidence, I was reading the excellent Philip Hensher novel The Mulberry Empire while the Afghan death toll was rising, and couldn’t help noticing the parallels there…
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Back home
My eagle-eyed reader will have noticed a change in the Topsyturvydom profile. We are now in Manchester, home city for both of us, and we feel we’ve come home.Doubtless blogging will be intermittent while we settle in.
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Welcome aboard
Fear of flying | Welcome aboard | Economist.com Recently back from Norway, which involved six flights, so this rang a bell…
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Dumb WAG
The Dumb Britain column in Private Eye is always good for a laugh – recent sample:Anne Robinson: Which is the only letter in the alphabet with three syllables? Contestant: Z. They haven’t picked up this great exchange, though, which I saw on the BBC sport page: Question on BBC1’s Test the Nation: “Who was Winston…
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Fame at last
I’m grateful to Pablo Fanque for pointing out that Topsyturvydom was recently featured in the “Blogwatch” section of the North – West Enquirer web site. By that strange internet process that James Joyce would doubtless call the commodius vicus of recirculation, the first name I saw there was that of someone I taught twenty eight…
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Arlo still has it…
To Manchester, to see Arlo Guthrie perform. Arlo is a girlhood hero of ‘er indoors, and a favourite of mine. He rarely makes it to these shores – the last time we saw him was 1988- so this was a must-see for us.He was great. Backed by son Abe and grandson (!) plus an excellent…
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The Devine Harriet
One of the pleasures of being a toiler in the groves of academe is that you get to work alongside some truly remarkable people. One such is my colleague Harriet Devine. Harriet’s academic reputation rests on her work on eighteenth and nineteenth century authors. She is a highly respected academic in her field, but has…