A few years back I got around to The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. I liked it but I swear, all I can remember is something about the Schlieffen Plan, and then the description of the German officer who spent his nights drinking wine and eating sausages. Sometimes I wonder why I even bother …
Continue reading “To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before”
This summer, man. Strikes and gutters, ups and downs. It was the kind of summer that had me contemplating breaking glass on The Emergency Plan, but then I read this: “… nearly all of the people I served with were unfulfilled in their expectations of the whole affair, myself included.” No kepi for me! *** …
John Noble Wilford knew that he was writing one of the most important stories of the century: The first human landing on another world. His article — for the front page of The New York Times on July 21, 1969, needed to begin with a sentence that conveyed the immensity of the moment. And …
I don’t know if it’s the pandemic or what, but the above tweet had some resonance. (NB in the Walter Mitty sense; I have neither the interest nor, probably, disposition to be an assassin.) I’ve been working on a short story and remain displeased with the opening sentence. It’s fine and all, but it ain’t …
“Tell me I’m not your man from Porlock. I’d never forgive myself.” I read that in David Mitchell’s Utopia Avenue and was like: huh? So I looked it up. Jeepers! Shared it with my friends, and one one of them, Jim, proposed the term be employed à la Good Will Hunting badinage, e.g. “I …
… [Jean-François] Champollion had been fascinated with the ancient Near East; he had a gift for learning languages and went on to study, among others, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Aramaic, Syriac (a form of Aramaic), and even Chinese. But his passion soon became Coptic, the language still spoken by a religious minority in Egypt. During his …
I developed an interest years ago after seeing one take off in Guinea. The first volume, alas, I left at my quarantined school, but here are three interesting sentences from the second: Canada, keen to gain a foothold in Tanzania since 1963, took the place of West Germany and in 1965 launched a project worth …
There’s a list of books I mean to write, and this one is somehow on it, even though I couldn’t bear to write it, let alone research it. It would be about how in one year three of the world’s worst tyrants – literal madmen – lost their jobs. In Equatorial Guinea, Macías Nguema …
