Archive for March, 2009
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Posted by Finn Kirkland on March 28, 2009
In the beginning there was the letter. Handwritten, focused, thought-provoking and sincere. Sentences would be considered, structured, and formulated in a way that could evoke any number of feelings and emotions, and it was the sort of piece that, when you finished writing, you felt content with the product in front of you: happy to [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 26, 2009
Samuel Johnson famously said that “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. This is sometimes misquoted as “when a man is bored with London, he is bored with life” (and sometimes wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde, but that’s another story). But what the great lexicographer definitely didn’t say was “when [...]
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Posted by Shane Rae on March 25, 2009
Why do the British refer to their eggplant as an ‘aubergine’? This Canadian wants to know. Upon my arrival in the UK, I was astounded to find that the Brits not only pronounce the names of some vegetables incorrectly (e.g. tomato) but they even use the wrong words for some. Could this be their desire [...]
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Posted by Stephen Bullon on March 25, 2009
Scarcely a day goes by without Robert Peston, the BBC Business Editor, telling us of yet another eye-watering sum of money being allocated by government to a failing bank, or an eye-watering loss sustained by a major corporation. Here he is on his blog on 5th January this year: And we can be fairly confident [...]
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Posted by Michael Rundell on March 24, 2009
Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – [...]
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