Light reading

From the archives of Luc Sante . Some very good Valley of the Dolls coverage here and elsewhere. I read the novel a few years ago: I don...

Just reread a book that made a great impression on me when I first read it ten years ago , Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease: The Dr...

A funny old post I found while looking for some quotations for my talk this week: my life in book titles .

Jeffrey Archer shows off his skills as a charity auctioneer .

Umberto Eco on how to travel with a salmon .

Facebook continues, I think, to leach my attention away from blogging. A lot of tabs to close (and I lost a whole bunch when a browser shut...

These are the days when Birds come back - A very few - a Bird or two - To take a backward look. These are the days when skies resume Th...

The quest for an authentic zoot suit ! Via Lynn Peril.

The market for super-butlers ( underlying link here ).

At the FT (site registration required), Jo Ellison on the late Duchess of Devonshire's possessions going up for auction : Ironically, an...

Penguin locomotion : "According to Dr Willener, getting these ungainly creatures to walk on a treadmill was one of the biggest challeng...

At the TLS, Samantha Ellis considers Deborah Lutz's history of the Brontes in objects : This book is partly an attempt to talk to the de...

My installment is up in the Hermenautic Tarot - the All-Seeing Eye ! Flying back to NYC in a few hours. It has been a really good trip - ...

From Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (not sure why I have just spent a beautiful afternoon at a tro...

I read two very good books this afternoon, each one chosen after I read something about it online: this led me to When Breath Becomes Air ...