While I’ve been shopping online since 1998 and have placed several thousand orders in the intervening years, less than half a dozen of...

19 May 2020 - Cadac Pizza Stone Compared with many, we were well placed to get through lockdown in some comfort. We had a big house...

Twenty-five years ago I was assistant to a senior publisher at Penguin Books who was responsible, as part of his portfolio, for the Time...

Sweaty Selfie at the top of Parliament Hill - 10 May 2020 I’d started running while working at Penguin Books, occasionally dodging...

By the middle of April we were deep into the first lockdown and I was going a bit mad. Anyone saying that things would soon return to...

Before Covid and lockdown and stay at home orders, I don’t think I’d really appreciated the value of retail therapy or accepted that it...

This post is part of a series about the things I've bought on Amazon since opening my account in September 1998. For more details about...

While the iPAC family of 'Pocket PCs' was clearly marketed at the sort of young urban professional who might be in the market for a...

Sometime during President Trump's first term, people stopped talking about the 'Overton Window', the spectrum of ideas considered...

Late last year I started thinking about things that once were useful and are no longer so. Skin, discarded by a snake This chain of...

Listening to sounds made of books in the London Library Forms of Paper (2024 remaster) I am sitting in the main reading room of the...

This post is part of a series of vignettes about the things I've bought on Amazon since opening my account in September 1998. For more...

For the last few months I've been working on a book idea that has been rattling around in my head for a couple of years or so...