John Baker’s Blog

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 [...]

The Hay Festival is a canvas village. With the rain pelting down all day today (it never paused for a second) the walkways were all sodden, the clientele even wetter.
But I’m already ahead of myself. Last night we went to bed around 1.00 am, the same time as the wedding guests were leaving. We thought [...]

Some words have different meanings,
and yet they’re spelt the same.
A cricket is an insect,
to play it — it’s a game.
On every hand, in every land,
it’s thoroughly agreed,
the English language to explain
is very hard indeed.
Some people say that you’re a dear,
yet dear is far from cheap.
A jumper is a thing you wear,
yet a jumper has [...]

Raymond Chandler, in The Simple Act of Murder, pays due homage to Hammett: ‘He gave murder back to the kind of people who commit it for reasons,’ he said. ‘Not just to provide a corpse.’ And in the same essay he goes on to describe the newer modernist hero:
. . . down [...]