I love coffee, and in 2000 I wrote the poem Reading the Tea Leaves. This is a kind of linguistic truism: the English say “reading the tea leaves“, while in Russian we say “reading th...
Just as I posted about friendship as love, I thought I’d post one of my all time favourites: Love Is a Beautiful Thing by Al Green. Featured in many romantic movies, to me this is simply one of ...
Friendship to me is no different from Love. I may expand on it in another post, but in short, I do not associate love primarily with sex or marriage, yet it is an important constituent in making a dec...
There are certain recordings that are simply the best. I can listen to no other version of the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata than that by Daniel Barenboim. Similarly, Yehudi Menuh...
Sir Edward Burne-Jones, The Star of Bethlehem, 1890 (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, UK) Image credit: Wikimedia. In 1886, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones were commissioned a tapestry for Exe...
It is a great pleasure for me to write this post because none of you (except my mother who reads the blog) knew me 10 years ago, in 1999. In 1999, I finally began to read in Tudor History which was to...
Update (30 December 2009): On December 25, 2009, it was announced that a team of Italian scientists were planning to exhume the remains of Leonardo da Vinci from his grave in Amboise in France. They w...
I am finishing 2009 on a high note with a trip to Sheffield on 29th December. It was a good trip and an interesting experience, which I will be talking about… in 2010! Arthur de Mowbray, Nativit...
At the end of November I went to Liverpool, more or less on the spur of the moment, as I often do. My adventurer’s spirit was well rewarded with a visit to Liverpool One Wheel. The report below ...
Putting My Feet Up in Via Fossa, Manchester One of my childhood memories about books is connected both to knitting and to Scotland. In one book there was this illustration: a man in kilt and long sock...