John Baker’s Blog

A taster:
I had in a drawer an illuminated parchment on which was written in elegant characters that on Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derison, half absolution and half condemnation. It had remained in that [...]

When the Swedish Academy met in 1902 to decide who was to take the second Nobel Prize in Literature, there were, basically, two names on the short-list. Some members, of course, were keen to award the prize to Leo Tolstoy, but a majority in the Academy could not bring themselves to accept the Russian’s radical [...]

A debate by the authors of two recent books, each in their way challenging the current parameters of Liberalism, both in the UK and the USA, brought together a crowd of perhaps four hundred people at the Hay Festival.
Stephen Marshall’s book, Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing, examines what he sees as the sell-out of American radicalism. [...]

There is a wonderfully funny video made by Norwegian Television (NRK), about a new book user interacting with medieval technical support.
It’s in Norwegian with sub-titles in both Danish and English.
But go take a look. It must have been hell for early-adopters back in those days of rapid change.
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