Magnificent Octopus

The war came. My friends fell away, most married and soon were showing their young bodies much swollen in parks, and, later on, were sitting...

For the little terrors in your life: The 13 Ghosts of Halloween , written by Robin Muller and illustrated by Patricia Storms. The story'...

Or: how I plan to increase my IQ by 10 points in less than 48 hours. Wednesday night: Alberto Manguel delivers the 2007 Massey Lectures: The...

This Lydnam Lodge was a folly and could never pay for itself. "Every egg cost a dollar," said Grandmother Morgan; but the Lodge wa...

"Walk into a good second-hand book shop , and there's an interesting selection made by a person, not a committee." "It...

It's taken almost 5 years, but she's finally bigger than the cat. The cat is not particularly enamored of this turn of events, but h...

(In which the verb "to feel" is used to excess.) Aurgh. This happens every so often: so much to say, no time to say it. All these ...

Doris Lessing is a favourite of mine, and today she won the Nobel prize for literature . The veteran US literary critic Harold Bloom has so ...

"I say without hesitation and without excuse that this is a turning point in history. Never has the threat of Soviet Communism been so ...

WireTap — still funny.

"Finding Patrick Hamilton feels somewhat like joining a secret society ." (Thanks, Tom .)

Me: "You're always singing. Why are you always singing?" Helena: "Because I love singing." The girl is always singi...

1. Tim Parks reviews That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana , by Carlo Emilio Gadda, in the London Review of Books . And still he thinks very ...

In the evening we went to see "Angel Street," which I recommend to anyone who wants to be absorbed and taken out of his daily roun...

Another new book by one of my favourite dead authors! I'd been awaiting Alexandre Dumas's The Last Cavalier Being the Adventures of ...

"Uncle is an elephant. He's immensely rich, and he's a B.A." Uncle , by JP Martin and illustrated by Quentin Blake, is ama...

It was around six in the evening, and light the colour of opal, pierced by the golden rays of the autumn sun, spread over a bluish sea. The ...

Saturday, J-F and I got in the car and drove. Without a destination, without a plan, and, for the most part, without worries. We had it in o...

Claude Chappe invented an optical telegraph network that operated in France from 1792 through 1846. It was instrumental in Napoleon's s...

In books Recently read: Moral Disorder , Margaret Atwood — I'm not much for short stories, and wouldn't've searched this book ou...