Humpty Dumpty

We all know that diamonds are for ever. (Well, we kind of know that. ‘Ever’ is a long time and nobody that we know of has been there.) We...

There are so many more types of wood in today’s world. Once it was a question of choosing between oak and pine or mahogany and fir. Then...

When we go looking for clues about something mysterious in the garden, we may reach for a microscope. If it is in the sky we may make...

Narcissus fell in love with himself when he saw his reflection in a stream. It ended well; he turned into a flower. So the polytheistic...

‘Who has despised the day of small things?’ asked Zerubbabel. He happened to be holding a plummet in his hands at the time, so perhaps he...

Once upon a time every boy and every girl left school and got a job. It was the done thing. New adults were expected to pay their way....

Everybody knew the name ‘Aeneas’, just as everybody today knows the name ‘Churchill’. He was a national figure, a survivor from Troy, a...

The term ‘engineer’ has a range of meanings. The person who fixes your central heating is an engineer. So is the person who works at...

But he was blind, pitiable, just like Samson. He was led by the hand. And this by his victims. For Paul was on a mission – to arrest the...

We have to remember that Paul did not live in a democracy. Neither did he live in a society that observed the rule of law. The Roman...

In 1919 Marie Lloyd sang ‘My old man said, “Follow the van,/Don’t dilly-dally on the way.” And hit the jack pot. Music-hall audiences...

Those of us who don’t enjoy shopping have to reconcile ourselves to the sight of cardboard. Mind you, it’s not unsightly; quite the...

We still lick envelopes, though fewer. We don’t wag tails since we have no tails. But otherwise, like dogs, we have ways of showing our...

‘Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ So say the French – more elegantly than our ‘The more it changes, the more it’s the same...

Games are played in the mind. This is more obvious in cricket than other games but in each case the mind has its place. The blazing heat...

STANDING IDLE Nowadays we express unemployment in terms of percentages. Other societies – Hardy’s rural markets for instance – looked at...

Cry havoc and the unleashed dogs will do the rest. Theirs is a mission of destruction and savagery. Few generations have been spared the...

‘If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience...