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Recently purchased books
Photoed just now: Although, I should say that I didn’t actually purchase Kristian Niemietz’s book about Socialism. I tried to buy it, at a recent IEA event, but they wouldn’t take my money and just...
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Ravenscourt Park photos
Yes, I was in Ravenscourt Park on Thursday evening, having a Libertarian Lads dinner in a restaurant there. As I usually do when visiting spots that are unfamiliar, I was anxious not to be late and so...
View ArticleStephen Davies on “the most rapid and sustained technological innovation...
I have recently been reading The Wealth Explosion by Stephen Davies. Its subtitle is “The Nature and Origins of Modernity”. I recommend it to anyone who wishes to think about why the “modernity” that...
View ArticleLethal White
I’ve just finished reading Lethal White, the latest Cormoran Strike book by J.K. Rowling, aka “Robert Galbraith”. The book is very long, nearly eight hundred pages in the paperback version I read, and...
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Swiss cat ladders
An amusing book. Not a book I’d buy, but a book I am glad to learn about: Switzerland-based graphic designer and writer Brigitte Schuster chronicles the unique phenomenon of outdoor cat ladders in her...
View ArticleThree more DI Meg Dalton books to come (following on from the first three)
Until around yesterday, fans of Roz Watkins’s DI Meg Dalton (who include me (Roz being my niece)) had to be content with knowing that there were, or would be, for sure, in all, just three Meg Daltons...
View ArticleStephen Davies is writing a horse book
Much as I would like to replace the late Findlay Dunachie, I don’t think I’m cut out to be a book reviewer. It takes too much focus. While you’re doing it, you can’t afford to get stuck into reading...
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Thoughts on the British Library
Recently a friend fixed for us to visit the British Library. Inside the British Library there is a big architectural model, of the British Library. Which looks like this: I have never really given much...
View ArticleFinally saying something about The Wealth Explosion
For far longer than I care to go back and calculate, I have been struggling to write a review of Stephen Davies’s new book, The Wealth Explosion. (Shortish excerpts from this book can be read here,...
View ArticleStephen Davies on the eflorescences that were stopped and on the eflorescence...
I continue to struggle to find ways of communicating my enthusiasm for Stephen Davies’s new book, The Wealth Explosion: The Nature and Origins of Modernity. But I now think I know one of the reasons...
View ArticleBad Bach
Here are two enticing paragraphs from a book which is coming out next month, entitled Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia: I’ve talked to people who feel they know Bach very well, but they aren’t...
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Creatures hitting the news in the USA
I’m not just talking about the hero dog who helped to catch an austere religious scholar, whose austere religious scholarship inspired him also to become a rapist and a torturer. I’m also talking about...
View ArticleDisplacement
So much for logic. More World Cup torture, for England anyway. By the end, it wasn’t even close. Looking back on it, it seems to me that what England did in this tournament was what France have done...
View ArticleAn architectural contrast
I am fond of writing from time to time, about how people with important jobs to do who spend too much time fretting about mere architecture are liable to take their eyes off the ball. What are we...
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Arthur Colley’s diary goes missing
Photoed by me this afternoon in Warwick Way: November 4th was quite a while back, so maybe it’s all been sorted by now. Hope so. But if not, sounds like he needs the help of somebody younger, with...
View ArticleOn reading about it without having to experience the bloody thing
All of us who know anything of the broader picture of art and its history have what we know to be blind spots, in the form of things we know to have merit, to be significant, to have an intelligent...
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There is always more space if you just keep looking
For quite a few months now I have been pacing about in my little flat in London SW1 (one of the many unfashionable bits of that postcode) looking for more space to put shelves for books and magazines...
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Bryan Caplan – Hayek Memorial Lecture – photos and an instant summary
Earlier this evening, I (and a great many other people) attended the 19th Hayek Memorial Lecture: Photo 1: I got there very early, hence all the empty seats. The Official Photographer was Jean-Luc...
View ArticleAnton Howes interviewed about his research
I spent my blogging time today concocting a posting about the opinions and discoveries of Anton Howes, and in particular this piece. My posting will be ready and up at Samizdata Real Soon Now. In the...
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A sixteenth century map of the world
Via Twitter, and something called Map Porn, I found my way to this world map drawn by Ahmed Muhiddin Piri in the 16th century: Yet I can only find one other reference to it on the www, in the form of a...
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