Southern Romania. On the buses that carry you between the small towns along the bank of the Danube a curious arrangement is in operation. At each stop the driver passes up and down the aisle collecting new fares. He offers me a student fare, for example, and then knocks ten per cent off that. To [...]
There were exhibitions and a film I'd wanted to see passing through London so I'd ignored the newspapers all the previous day. It was only as we were boarding that I found out. Some passengers ahead of me in the queue were delaying everybody, helping themselves to three or four different newspapers at the entrance [...]
“You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars” [Thomas Traherne (1637-75)] On a summer's day, two years ago, I was in a plane that was passing over the Alps. There was a thin layer of burnt jet-fuel [...]
“It were unwise to be sanguine and unphilosophical to despair” – John Playfair, 1814. In an essay of 1888, with the novels on which his reputation rests both completed, Samuel Butler reflected on how he might describe himself. “Philosophical writer” was the best fit, he concluded, even if any close reader of Butler will agree [...]
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