Among the moral influences on my childhood, and that of my fellow English countrykids, was Hilaire Belloc's 'Cautionary Tales for Children'. Entering the Land of Nod at night to the story of Jim who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion, or Matilda who said lies and was burnt to death,…
Que?
The English language often lags scientific progress. We still 'turn on the radio', even if none of us have seen a dial in years. When my kids were growing up, I always reminded them to 'pull the chain' even though toilet flush mechanisms had long been more user-friendly. And today, our computers offer us the…
Bog standard (almost)
Charles Dickens's fecund imagination allowed Pip's benefactor Magwitch to return to England from transportation to an Australian penal colony, albeit at risk of judicial execution. By all accounts, thanks to the triple-knot of location, location, location, escape for real-life transportees wasn't all that simple. What the desperate convicts of the nineteenth century needed was the…
Tax Break 