Barons Court

It’s a bit of a mystery how Barons Court got its name. Here are the clues and you must play Poirot today. The area between the North End Road and Hammersmith was only built over in the last decades of the 19th century.

Good Reads

Yesterday’s post had a list of MPs who abstained in this week’s Commons vote on airstrikes in Syria. Today’s post is another list. I’m becoming an obsessive-compulsive list-maker. It’s not a new complaint; much of The Old Testament is lists of who begat whom and Burke’s and Debrett are keeping up the good work.

The No Vote Brigade

I suggested in a recent post, Let Slip The Dogs of War, that the oratory in the House of Commons debate about authorising bombing targets in Syria would be uninspiring. Well, Hilary Benn proved me wrong.

Published
Categorised as Politics

Hatchard Job

Gifford’s name has cropped up a few times here and, as he has never sent in his legal team to sue the socks off me, here he is again. He has drawn my attention to a poll conducted by Hatchards to pick the best novel of the past 200 years.

Let Slip The Dogs of War

Henry V was written about 400 years ago. At its centre lies Agincourt, fought about 185 years earlier, as remote for Shakespeare and his audience as Waterloo is for us today.

You Rang, M’Lord?

Reading P G Wodehouse is a source of great pleasure to me but it has a serious angle. It, subliminally, provides education on titles and forms of address and he doesn’t put a foot wrong.

A Flash In The Park

Maddy, I hope you don’t mind if I recount a story you told me many years ago. You used to bicycle home from work through Hyde Park and receive the attentions of a flasher who would jump out from behind a tree and expose to you those bits of him in a southerly direction.

Published
Categorised as Art

K2+K6 Doesn’t Equal K9

I hadn’t visited the Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields for about a decade. It has had some major work done in that period and now looks even more like it did on the day of Soane’s death in 1837.

Mappa Mundi

The Naval Museum in Madrid originates from a proposal my ancestor, Mendoza y Rios, made towards the end of the 18th century. It is only a biscuit’s throw (a favourite expression of my grandfather) from the Prado and is worth visiting for one exhibit alone.