John Baker’s Blog

We grabbed another chance to see Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, presented by the Old Bomb Theatre at York Theatre Royal and directed by Cecily Boys.
Early evening, a country road, a tree.
Nobody comes and nobody goes…
Old friends Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot, but who is he? What has he to offer?
Sometimes hilariously funny, sometimes [...]

Robert Fisk, in The Independent, is seduced by the power of historic books in a Beirut bookshop:
(Habib, the bookseller, walks) over to me with a massive volume, printed in 1890 and entitled Architectural Studies in Italy, number 49 out of only 150 copies, authored by William J Anderson, president of the Glasgow Architectural Association. “The [...]

Blue Girls
Twirling your blue skirts, travelling the sward
Under the towers of your seminary,
Go listen to your teachers old and contrary
Without believing a word.
Tie the white fillets then about your hair
And think no more of what will come to pass
Than bluebirds that go walking on the grass
And chattering on the air.
Practice your beauty, blue girls, [...]

The Times Online has a nice piece imagining a reading list for capitalists:
Right now, I would like to put every City trader and master-of-the universe banker into an offshore penal colony where they would have to make their own clothes out of copies of The Wall Street Journal, cook a ration of rice in a [...]