World Building and Woolgathering

I've been reading Orlando Furioso , the epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto.   Lacking or ignoring the many heroic poems of the early Middles ...

The press is one of the great movers of the new age. If you are going to spread ideas or report on a new discovery or promulgate a new law,...

I acquired a book called North Russian Architecture in a give-away a few months back. A small item, pages of heavy high-quality paper, a wo...

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian , 1951 (trans. into English 1954 by the author and Grace Frick) Historical fiction. Read in light o...

You must never call it a necropolis, for it is no such thing. It is merely the city where the dead dwell. No memorials, no tombs, no graveya...

There are all sorts of interesting devices these days. Bigger and better telescopes, dense almanacs, precisely fitted sextants. And since th...

Naomi Mitchison,   The Corn King and Spring Queen Can't say I was as taken by this as False Patrick , but still very good. It's an i...