John Baker’s Blog

In Joan Russell Noble’s Recollections of Virginia Woolf Louie Mayer, the Woolfs’ cook at Rodmell from 1934 to 1969, describes how Virginia Woolf taught her to make bread:
But there was one thing in the kitchen that Mrs Woolf was very good at doing; she could make beautiful bread. The first question she asked me when [...]

I’ve installed Alex King’s WordPress Mobile Edition Plugin on this site to make it easier for people with mobile devices to read and comment. This is an impressive program which automatically recognises that you are using a device with a small screen. It cuts out pictures and organises the text so that it is possible [...]

STILLE NACHT
On the night
that I was born,
the bells rang out
across the world.
In Coventry, in Dresden,
the cathedral bones sheltered
worshippers with candles,
witnessing the ruins.
In Auschwitz-Birkenau,
the story goes,
the death’s-head guards
sang, “Stille nacht,
heilige nacht”. Their voices
slid across the Polish snow.
The sweetest tenor was Ukrainian,
the man they called Peter the Silent.
He never spoke and he killed
with a lead-filled stick.
In [...]

Reporters sans frontières (Reporters without Borders) latest press freedom index shows North Korea, Turkmenistan, and Eritrea as the worst violators of press freedom. They remain with Burma, Cuba and China at the bottom of the list.
France, the United States and Japan slip further into the repression of media criticism, while Mauritania and Haiti gain [...]