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Introducing the book
I loved this. I was reminded of an old cartoon, showing a monk slumped over a manuscript weeping. Two other monks are watching, and one says “I see the copier’s broken down again!” Hat tip: Bibliobibuli
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Now, this is what you call snow
BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Upstate New York buried in snowAs usual, Britain collapses into chaos because a few flakes of snow have fallen. I think we don’t bother having any contingency plans so that we can have heart warming “spirit of the blitz” stories on the evening news. The British legion club…
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Where’s my African readership?
According to the Clustr map, someone is clicking on Topsyturvydom all over the place, except Africa. Truly, the dark continent…
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Humans blamed for climate change
Humans blamed for climate change Who knew, eh? There was me, blaming the monkeys…
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North and South
The novel by Elizabeth Gaskell used the North-South divide as its central conceit. Here’s a modern take on the phenomenon, now exacerbated by the metropolitan bias of the media. Somehow, you feel those BBC types wouldn’t be quite so discombobulated if their putative move was to, say, Brighton rather than Salford…
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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…