Today’s whatever is a beautiful piece of prose written by the legend that is Tom Sheehan. Anyone who is a regular reader will be aware of Tom’s enormous contribution to the site. Newcomers would be well advised to have a look at his back catalogue. All four pages of titles. Now, though we give you Winter Solstice 2016
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A Favourite Place: Innerpeffray, Scotland’s oldest free lending library, established 1680.
Article by Michael Bloor
I’ve always been nuts about libraries. I’m pretty fond of bookshops, but libraries were my first and truest love. First of all, the local Carnegie library, where I went as a little lad, accompanying my grandad when he went to change his Zane Grey cowboy thrillers. Then, the central library in town, with its reference section, and its newspaper/periodicals section, with old men dozing in the central heating. The university libraries and The National Library of Scotland, where all manner of rare and wonderful books can be summoned up from the stacks for your study, all absolutely…FREE!
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Derby in the English Midlands, where I was born and raised, is an industrial city, famous in the past for its locomotives, and in the present for Rolls Royce aero engines. In my lifetime, an awful lot of its old buildings have been knocked down, even the ancient church of St Alkmund’s, swept away with its graveyard to make room for the new inner ring road. But it still has a lot of old pubs: The Dolphin Inn, for example, dates back to 1580. So the fact that The Noah’s Ark pub is two hundred years old is hardly noteworthy. What is pretty interesting though, is how it got its title. It’s not named after ‘the illustrious first navigator,’ as one Victorian local historian phrased it. It’s named after a locally famous character called Noah Bullock who had a house on that site, back in the seventeenth century.
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Amnesia – An Essay by Douglas Hawley
I’ve had clinical amnesia, but it was relatively insignificant. Some other cases have been earth shaking. Let’s start with a lesson ignored or forgotten to the present day. The Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 started a trade war and according to Wikipedia it was catastrophic. There is general consensus that it contributed to the Great Depression. Subsequently, raising tariffs have been tried and failed on many occasions, including as it is currently being used by the US president who seems to think that he is a good business man. Classic economics has always held that people and countries should usually buy the cheapest regardless of where it originates, making tariffs counterproductive.
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literally stories 