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If you cast your eyes over the canon of Russian authors, you could be forgiven for thinking that women writers were as rare as hen’s teeth. There are a few names, mainly poets – Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva – who spring to mind, but the big guns were men – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevesky, Bulgakov et al. However, in recent years a new spate of translations has put paid to that myth. It …

It's more than 100 years since the foundation of The State = Saorstát Éireann which didn't formally sever the last umbilical to the UK until Easter 1949 when the The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force. The Free State / Saorstát had been minting its own coins since 1922 but they were the same size and denomination as British coins and the latter circulated freely in Ireland, at …

Last week I wrote about Why a warm up shouldn’t be just vocal exercises. This week I’m going to revisit five old posts which look at warm ups in more detail. This is one of a series of summary posts around a specific topic, bringing together five relevant posts from the past. Warm ups are often a bone of contention: some singers love them and would happily have a whole …

The St Lawrence is water, the Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames is liquid history. John Elliot Burns (1858-1943)

Look at these two happy bakers! They are looking on the sweet-side of life while they are busy decorating wedding cakes. This is an extra-impossibly difficult scene to recognize unless the film this screenshot is from is one of your favorites. As always, if you are not familiar with the rules to the Impossibly Difficult Name that Movie game or the prize, click here!

An Almost Impossible Thing by Fiona Davison made it on to a number of Best Books of 2023 lists, but as most of them were in gardening publications with limited circulation, you’d be excused if you missed it. But what a sad miss that would be for anyone interested in not just garden history but women’s history. Davison, who has the envious job of Head of Libraries and Exhibitions at …

Happy Sunday, everyone! It’s been an action-packed week with plenty of travel, presenting lots of opportunities to explore and test new stuff. Apart from some fun gear, I really enjoyed reading Sebastiaan de With’s absolutely gorgeous review of the iPhone 16 cameras, discovering a new iOS app for making delightful QR codes, trying out a magic app for turning 2D photos and video into 3D material for the Apple Vision …

In this post, we’ll talk about how to make rice flour to use in various recipes. All you need is raw rice and a powerful blender! Why Make Your Own Rice Flour? Rice flour is an ingredient that we use often in recipes like Turnip Cake (Lo Bak Goh), Taro Cake, and Nian Gao (Chinese ... View Post

After the best part of a month spent reading Japanese literature, today I manage to pull myself away to try something a little different, and ‘different’ definitely fits the bill here. My latest choice is a book that’s literally out of this world, taking us into outer space and into the midst of a war. It’s not all conflict, though. You see, romance is just as important in space as …

Birdcage is about the machinations of a British intelligence agency, referred to as "Birdcage" because its offices are in Birdcage Walk in London. There is very little oversight of this covert security group and the agents are generally amoral, although they believe that their mission is important to the welfare of the country. In reality, the higher ups are just trying to protect the government in question which they serve …

Pruning boxwoods is a job that's easy, and easy to put off. A conundrum indeed. If you've put it off for years, believe it or not, you can bring your boxwoods back to their original charm with one or two terrifying hard prunings. Over the past 20 years or so since I planted them, these...Read More

WowHaus Limited edition Modernist Weekly Planner 2025 Limited edition Modernist Weekly Planner 2025 (image credit: Blue Crow Media) I was going to save this for the gift guide update, but the Modernist Weekly Planner 2025 might sell out. (image credit: Blue Crow Media) It might not—and if it is still around, it will make my gift guide. But I have been stung before with these things. The Brutalist Calendar by …

I had to come back from the West sadly as my liver was acting up. It drains me and I have no energy me especially after feeling a bit better over the last few weeks. I hardly sleep which is awful. Yet I have to live with this and the ups and downs. I am back home now it’s pouring but such is life. Kalies flowers from her garden I …

tanadrin:My copy of Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s by @70sscifiart just got here, and it’s gorgeous. A seriously impressive collation of work, with a wealth of information on individual artists and on trends in popular SF illustration in the period. Also nostalgic as hell to see some of my favorite cover illustrations from old paperback books I read as a teenager. Awesome! Glad you liked it!