Observation & Drollery

Over twenty-five years of intensive traveling, I must have made (I roughly calculate) more than a thousand trips to Heathrow and back.  You would have thought there was little in the limo or minicab business that I had not seen in that time, but on my way to the aerodrome this trip I encountered a…

In the 20 years before the first world war, Hungary produced an extraordinarily high proportion of the worlds greatest ever photographers.  Robert Capa, Brassaï,  André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy, and Martin Munkácsi, were all Hungarian, and all born between 1894 and 1913.  Their  work and history is shown in a seminal exhibition at the Royal Academy, which I urge…

Hustling through. Waterloo station on Friday, I noticed numerous identical little ladies in pink t-shirts collecting for what seemed to be ‘Greek Animal Rescue’.  I am always happy to give to deserving causes, but in a hurry, I couldn’t figure out what this meant.  What could this charity be about? Was it for example, the rescue of British…

Famed family turn out to have quite interesting names after all I only occasionally go to the movies,  and then usually only to foreign language films, (which must lack whimsy and in which the dog must not die). As a result I by and large missed the work of the talented late actor River Phoenix, or that…

A method formerly used to baffle fiendish mastermind Fu Manchu comes back into style It’s been a while since the world was threatened by evil genius Fu Manchu. Dr Manchu and his posse of grinning Lascars, Dacoits, and Thugees terrorized the world through the work of Sax Rohmer in the first half of the 20th…

Roger Ebert, the celebrated Chicago Sun-Times film critic and general good egg, recently won a New Yorker caption competition after 107 attempts spread over many years.  He wrote a nicely dry column for the Guardian about it, which in the Web version, omits the actual cartoons.  Ebert’s quest to win a competition is also covered…