It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry. Read more…
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Read more >>>Anyone who has made it to grade four or five on the piano will, almost certainly, have encountered a piece by Chopin. Certainly, no compilation of “classics for beginners” is complete without his E minor Prelude. It’s got everything the fledgling pianist needs to feel good about their technique: it’s short, it’s in a gratifyingly slow speed and it has a [...]
Read more >>>Imagine this: you drop onto the sofa on a Sunday afternoon, switch on the TV and see a dapper young man with a baton standing before an orchestra and demonstrating the patterns conductors use to lead music in different meters — two, three, four and five beats to the bar. He directs his players in a few examples, bits of Beethoven’s [...]
Read more >>>In Sutton Courtenay churchyard about 10 miles south of Oxford, near the imposing tomb of H. H. Asquith, the prime minister 100 years ago, a much simpler gravestone reads “Eric Arthur Blair.” It was to that grave a friend and I recently made a pilgrimage for a sad anniversary. Blair died of tuberculosis on Jan. 21, 1950, at the age [...]
Read more >>>In 1907 Mark Twain, America’s best-loved living author, visited England in a blaze of glory. Among the fellow literary lights he met there were Rudyard Kipling, who described the camera shutters around Twain “click-clicking like gun locks,” and George Bernard Shaw. “He is in very much the same position as myself,” Shaw said of Twain. “He has to put matters in [...]
Read more >>>Simply Charly took first place “by a landslide” for its caricature of Salvador Dalí on Wittygraphy, an online community to discover, share, and promote the art of caricature from all over the world. Learn more…
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