Andrew
@generalising
Not another one to try and remember. We'll see. Librarian. Scholarly communications, historic MPs, Wikipedia, inter alia other things. Misplaced Scot.
Oddity from an early le Carré (1968) - a character uses the modern sense of "stalking", seemingly before the term was coined, and then apologises for using such a strange metaphor. (OED has it as "anticipating this use" and first normal citation in 1981.)
Still testing the 4x5 but I think I'm getting the hang of it. Here's the bookshelf railway investigators* * long story
Took a while to get hold of film but ... looks like we have a success. Technically a success. Aesthetically, well, that's going to take a while longer.
1927: Herbert jokes about a court being called upon to decide what successor of a political party should get an inheritance 2026: news.bloomberglaw.com/employee-ben...
"when did you stop beating your wife" is a trick question to which there is famously no good answer. conversely, "do you beat your wife" is a straightforward question to which there ... kind of obviously is a good answer? shootingthemessenger.blog/2026/07/30/s...
Today's odd historical footnote: in 1931 someone bought the rights to salvage the Lusitania and proposed doing so by ... building a ladder down to it. You'd climb down a 200' tube at atmospheric pressure then enter a diving airlock. They got as far as building the tube.
congratulations to the UX designers at the British Newspaper Archive, who have taken a site that basically worked, and done their best to fix that problem. Look at this sidebar: in the old design it would be sorted by frequency and I could tell at a glance what the shape of the hits were. Now, no.
I think something may have gone just very slightly wrong with the measurements for this table
Slightly faded tube map OR inevitable triumph of the Circle Line, who can say
Important discovery on the library shelves today. Truly we have everything.
the BBC has put Children of Men on iplayer (because we need cheering up?) and I have ... concerns... about the discovery that it is set one year and five months from now.
Also good to know that Philip Marlowe is fully aware of the genre he lives in.
The Normandy anniversary today reminds me of an oddity I stumbled on in the newspaper archives: "D-Day" was the accepted name for it well *before* it happened. In October 1943 the Evening News needed to gloss the term, but by spring 1944 it was quite widely used, even down to ads.
Very interesting piece here on how Wikipedia developed its AI guidelines and how internal decision-making struggled to decide on something. link.springer.com/article/10.1... I like this conceptualisation of the problem -
Enjoying this ad from the London papers in 1913. Plenty of them are still around a century later!
Not a big football guy but I did enjoy going for a walk through the aftermath of the Arsenal parade today - everyone chill and friendly and having the absolute time of their lives.
And as expected - here's the Guardian, the Telegraph, and the BBC on the "hostage". The BBC is a bit circumspect (it is "another tradition", and I guess if it's sixty years old then it counts as one in its own right by now) but the others do inevitably bring it back to the Civil War.
Jumping back to the "hostage", there were a couple of mentions of the concept in 1964, again both about Whitlock and it is quite possible both came from him though they're not attributed as such. In his predecessors time (1960) the tradition was claimed to be "guarding the Queen's silver"...
Michael Portillo also reported having been offered venison (the price had risen a little). The Royal Parks now say it is all sold to defray expenses, though - perhaps a post-97 reform? www.thetimes.com/travel/desti...
meanwhile I hope that everyone writing stories about the "time-honoured tradition of keeping the Vice-Chamberlain hostage" also asks if he still gets his allowance of venison
Thinking about it I suspect that what Hayes was referring to here was that he delivered the King's reply (which indeed he did, a few days later), and I assume he still needed the full regalia for that. (Shocking error, of course, we expect precise ceremonial nuances from the Richmond Herald)
Prior to that the Vice-Chamberlain may not have always attended at the Palace - in 1942 there was a story about James Edmondson being "in the procession", and in 1934 Jack Hayes talked about what sounds like the Black Rod role, though I wonder if this was the reporter getting muddled.
A few years earlier it was reported in the much more mundane form of the Vice-Chamberlain being at the Palace in his, well, chamberlain role (this is 1952 and 1949), so I wonder if maybe Whitlock was the original source of the joke?