Saturday, September 15, 2012

Saturday, September 8, 2012

gone south ... back next weekend


















... of course, i won't be drinking too much, or over-eating, or talking loudly and slowly to the foreigners ... i'm sure you know me better than i know myself

Monday, September 3, 2012

Thursday, August 30, 2012

a bbc radio essay by sarah bakewell about montaigne




http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00xj0ys/The_Essay_Montaigne_Sarah_Bakewell/

and a link to her website

http://www.sarahbakewell.com/

and a brief summary of her career in her own words ...

‘I studied philosophy at the University of Essex. I became enthralled by the work of Martin Heidegger and started a PhD on him, but the spell wore off as quickly as it had been cast, and I dropped out to move to London and work in a tea-bag factory.

‘My job was to catch boxes of tea-bags spat at me by a machine, flip them on their sides, and push them in groups of six to the next person on the line. It was only for the first two hours that machine spat faster than I could flip, but they were the most memorable two hours of my life.

‘After this, I worked in bookshops for several years, did a postgraduate degree in Artificial Intelligence, and wrote fiction in my spare time, before landing a job at the Wellcome Library for the History of Medicine. There, I spent ten fascinating years as a cataloguer and curator of early printed books. It was while cataloguing that collection that I came across the tales that started me off as a non-fiction writer: odd medical cases, and a mysterious, angry pamphlet by a “Mrs Stewart”, which became the seed of my book The Smart.

‘Since 2002, my main job has been writing. I also teach writing courses in both fiction and non-fiction, curate occasional exhibitions, and catalogue old books for the National Trust.’

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

yes ! of course montaigne had studied erasmus !


















i found out by copying the file containing the whole of montaigne's essays from project gutenberg

transferring it in to microsoft word

and then doing a simple word-search for "Erasmus"

just as well ... because the first reference the computer discovered, in the blink of an eye, was on page 949