Notes on the here and now
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The renaming of things
I heard a historian on the radio the other day cite a year and add ‘Common Era’ at the end. It irritated me. The BCE/CE nomenclature has been in common use for a couple of decades now, but it still irritates me. Continue reading
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Opening the windows
On a recent trip to Paris, I experienced one of the simple pleasures of travelling abroad, which is the ability to fully open the windows of the hotel room you’re staying in. 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
About Me

Writer. Londoner. Wayfarer on the rolling English road.
the other place

I write about British places and history at theseislands.blog.