Early Modern Whale

Ho-hum: reading again: this time, a posthumous biography of a man who did nothing, but whose culture could find abundant terms in whic...

My last two posts made me think of this rather sprightly broadsheet ballad from 1620, with its woodcut of a small dog in pursuit of a vast a...

I have been looking at early modern adverts. 'My griefs cry lowder then aduertisement', says Leonato, angry about the 'death...

One of Lupin the rabbit's more spectacular moults, for all the world as if she was trying to send a signal spelled out in fur. She is ab...

I have been reading the Memoirs of Lord Hervey… but there, another book. I do have other things in my life, I allege. Why nobody has dram...

Maybe I qualify myself (as a fossil in literature, that is). My friend Simon accuses me (well, not in so many words) of having outed myself ...

Well, there's a title to get the readers flooding in! But I use this blog as a small act of expiation: when I was a teenager, I would cy...

Adventurous life in two interpretations: on the left, my son Tim hauled up onto the Thames riverbank amidst a strew of sandwich boxes and to...

It’s life as we know it, Tim! A review of One More Kilometre and We’re in the Showers: Memoirs of a Cyclist by Tim Hilton (Harper-Coll...

“On a bike, your consciousness is small”: a review of The Rider . “ Meyrueis, Lozère, June 26, 1977 . Hot and overcast. I take my ge...

The famous image of John Donne as a melancholy lover, which the National Portrait Gallery has launched an appeal to buy for the nation: http...

I just hauled a fat '1001 things you must see before you die' book back to the library. Yes, looking at pictures again, while trying...

I was putting on a fake rant a couple of days ago to provoke one of my postgraduate students (“Davenant is really the wet rot in mi...

The Sea! The Sea! The new contemplative me increasingly finds books with words in them too taxing... this was my favourite image in a '...

I am reading, with astonished interest, Mark Cocker and Richard Mabey's masterpiece. No, I have never 'twitched', but I am alway...

Dr Roy: pedals through life in an armoured car Posted by Picasa

Continuing with thoughts on whales, this is a Dutch painting of 1639, of whales being flensed and reduced to whale oil in Spitzbergen. It is...

The tagging of last week's stranded whale, SW2006/40, made me think of earlier examples of whales that got into the Thames. On June 3rd,...