Here are some photos and videos of the scene in Rakurakuen during the Hiroshima Ekiden – the prefectural relay marathon – that ran from Peace Park in the centre of Hiroshima City to Miyajimaguchi and back on Sunday afternoon. Rakurakuen is approximately halfway between Hiroshima city centre and the island [Read more…]
Last night I hopped onto the tram and headed into town to meet a couple of other teachers and a bunch of our former students who all graduated from Hiroshima College of Foreign Languages in March 2018. We made up a party of 14 people. The students had attended either [Read more…]
Lear fell because use he was too choleric and Gloucester lost his eyes because he was too credulous; but neither choler nor credulity worked alone.
This is a blog post about the novel Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier which I first published on a previous and now defunct blog. The review morphs into a discussion of Secret Knowledge by David Hockney. I read the novel and at least a part of Secret [Read more…]
The Rakurakuen grapevine was buzzing the other day with news that Yataizushi, the sushi-izakaya opposite Rakurakuen tram-stop, 寿司居酒屋 や台ずし 楽々園駅前町, was offering 100 yen beers all evening from Tuesday to Thursday of this week. I mentioned this to my loquacious quaffing partner, Brendan McG. and we agreed on popping into the [Read more…]
I spent this afternoon listening to the Audible version of Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature (narrated by Paul Michael), which I also blogged about – here – a few days ago. I especially enjoyed the section in the fourth chapter devoted to toxic personality types. amzn_assoc_tracking_id = “clevercuckoon-20”; [Read more…]
I returned home from a class today to find two parcels in the letter box. Two books that I’d more or less forgotten that I’d ordered. Their arrival was timely as today is my birthday. One is The City and Man by Leo Strauss. The other is Machiavelli’s God by [Read more…]
I bought my first chess book from the post office and general store in Sandhurst, Kent, England, some time around 1975 or 1976. The book in question was the paperback version of Teach Yourself Chess by Gerald Abrahams. My original copy fell to pieces long ago. The one in the [Read more…]
I wrote this review of Concrete Island, by J. G. Ballard back in 1988. Three years before that I had read a review of Empire of the Sun in a newly launched and short-lived literary magazine called Words, which folded a few months later (just after I had paid for [Read more…]
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