Da quei che sapevo, la scuola di Market Snobsbury era stata costruita intorno al 1416 e, come per la maggior parte di queste antiche costruzioni, nel grande salone deve aveva luogo la ceremonia aleggiava un odore di stantio che si aveva andato via via accumulando attraverso i secoli.

I know quite a number of Russian young ladies who are entirely besotted with Hugh Laurie through that connection....

I bought The Old Man and the Sea today to take on holiday.  If I was better at sums I could work out how much it costs per page.  I'll post my reactions when I've read it.

It's a skimpy book, I think, possibly less than 100 pages: if he bought it new, Don B can certainly consider himself ripped off.

Well I have read it, and I am glad that I did.  Its central character is as different from me as could be: inarticulate, physically strong, living in abject poverty.  I can see how it is regarded as beautiful, tragic and heroic.

And yet I would have been more moved by an account of a very frail old women in near destitution, getting up and struggling to leave a few flowers on her husband's grave.  That would require just as much courage, determination and physical endurance as an old man spending three days at sea with almost no sleep and only some raw fish to eat (yuck) even if he was a champion arm wrestler in his youth.

Honestly I don't believe that that degree of endurance is physically possible, but then I am a confirmed wimp.

And there's this odd thing about the hunter and the prey being bound together, so the old man is always saying how beautiful the marlin is.  And there is this awful continuous comparison to competitive games - the old man keeps on thinking about baseball.  Being a winner is what matters, even if the sharks eat all the marlin.

The last literary account of a hunt I read was in Anthony Trollope's The Eustace Diamonds, where at least the right wing politics are blatant.  It was also funnier.

I haven't looked at this board for ages and can see that I have a great deal of catching up to do!. However, just dropping in on this one to ask whether you know there is a book in a newish series called 'Coffee with Hemingway'. Can't remember author. I've ordered four in the series: 'Coffee with (a) Plato, (b) Aristotle, (c) Isaac Newton and (d) Einstein. They are only small books so I'll read them on the CCTV. The Isaac Newton one is by Bill Bryson - which is the reason I noted the title when I heard it somewhere - in conjunction with a Michael White.