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Tools of the trade
In the extract above, Anthony Burgess is talking about his his trusty manual typewriter when he talks about ‘Qwert Yuiop’. Burgess was writing in 1986, before advent of the mass-produced, general-purpose personal computer, but a time when special-purpose word processors were beginning to edge out the typewriter. Continue reading
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Before and after ‘Science’
A couple of weeks ago, the Quite Interesting Twitter account posted a photograph of a paragraph from a paper by Robert Boyle, presented to the Royal Society in 1666. The topic of the paper was potential areas of research into England’s coal mining industry. Continue reading
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American-English comprehension
My love of cinema began in my mid-teens. Back then, when there were only four television channels in the UK, the BBC broadcast a steady stream of old movies. My favourites were black and white American films from the1930s and 1940s. Continue reading
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The curious case of the misleading blurb
As far as I know, no-one has ever had a complaint about a book blurb upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority. Continue reading
About Me
Writer. Londoner. Wayfarer on the rolling English road.
the other place
I write about British places and history at theseislands.blog.