#x2026

The mayor of Greater Manchester is the latest in a long line of politicians to try to show he’s on the right track … etc

Sexy dad swap, the anti-ageing cream so good everyone will think your husband should be in prison, and the long con to make King Charles look good … you can’t say Saturday Night Live UK hasn’t gone there! Here are the best skits

Peter Phillips’ LRB review (Vol. 48 No. 8 · 7 May 2026; archived) of Composers in the Middle Ages, edited by Anne-Zoé Rillon-Marne and Gaël Saint-Cricq, is very enlightening to me, since I’d forgotten what little I once knew about medieval music; I’m…

Perhaps the non-alcoholic alternative for wine drinkers should not be a wine at all, but a different sip altogether? We slurp through some likely candidates …

I learned a couple of new words from this fascinating “interactive” NY Times article by Abraham Z. Cooper, a pulmonary and critical care physician and associate professor of medicine (archived versions don’t seem to work, because of the interactivity, but…

Delta Goodrem, rappers on scooters and a Lion spray-painted silver from head to toe … as Europe’s pop circus returns amid protests and pyrotechnics, we pick the songs set to dominate this year’s grand final. Bangaranga!

Russian лунатик [lunátik] and English lunatic are the faux-est of faux amis: the English word means only ‘madman’ and the Russian one only ‘sleepwalker’; I should really have called the post Veltman’s Sleepwalker, but that would have sounded weird to me,…

Nils William Olsson has a paper called “What’s in a Swedish Surname?” (Swedish American Genealogist 1.1 [1981]) that is, as you might expect, about Swedish surnames. I’ll quote some bits that particularly interested me:

Keegan Bradley said of attempting to make next year’s Ryder Cup team: ‘It’s going to be really hard … but how fun would that be?’

Yihwen Chen’s warm and galvanising documentary follows queer punk band Shh…Diam! as they battle discrimination with humour and raw energy

Venya Gushchin reviews (for the Brooklyn Rail, “an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond”) what sounds like an interesting translation-cum-adaptation of one of the most famous works of Russian literature:

From Theguardian RSS Feed: Tom Gauld on Chaucer’s first unboxing video – cartoon

These fried rice balls are the Sicilian equivalent of a sandwich lunch, and can be batch-made in advance. Here is your step-by-step guide …

As the pioneering BalletBoyz company celebrates its 25th anniversary and Billy Elliott returns to the stage, the male dance landscape appears transformed from where it was at the turn of the century. But a certain macho dismissiveness remains …

Ah, in my younger days how I would have lusted for the Gold Medal of Philology! To get up on a stage before a glittering international crowd and give a carefully prepared speech humbly acknowledging that my ground-breaking work on the Indo-European…

Barenaked bell ringers, banned opera singers and mind-boggling dog-owner relationships … the art at this year’s biennale has people calling the cops

Another word that keeps popping up in our reading of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (see this post) is gymkhana, and eventually I thought to investigate it, since I was fuzzy about both meaning and etymology. Wiktionary says:

Back in 2020 I posted about the etymology of pedant; now I offer a very interesting review by Clare Bucknell (NYRB, May 14, 2026; archived) of On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-It-All by Arnoud S. Q. Visser.…