If you were traversing Terminal 5 at London’s Heathrow last August, you may have seen a writerly-looking chap sat tapping on a computer, his words being displayed on a large plasma screen over his head. This was the temporary Writer In Residence, Alain de Botton, and he was writing a book about what airports really [...]
Posts Tagged ‘books’
Reader’s Digest books: Read and Digest
It’s recently struck me that Reader’s Digest, one of the most popular magazines in the world, is a paper-based blog.
Staunchly populist – and conservative and anti-communist, depending on the era – the magazine has been publishing condensed news stories and adverts in a visually arresting fashion since 1922. It’s uncluttered, breezy and the kind of [...]
Not-Heartwarming Saturday
To think: 600,000 words in the English language, and I need a new one.
The word that almost defines what I need it to mean, but falls unacceptably short, is “heartwarming“. That’s a word that belongs with other artistic damnations such as “family viewing” and “A Michael Bay film”. If something is “heartwarming”, it’s so heavily [...]
