Rupert Brooke in exile: “And is there honey still for tea?”

In 1913, after a emotional upset, the English poet Rupert Brooke visited North America. He wrote travel diaries for the Westminster Gazette, an influential Liberal newspaper based in London. Best known for his idealistic poems “The Soldier” and “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester”, he was also a great travel writer.

Malana: Indian village of ancient tradition and marijuana

Malana is a two thousand year old village in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh, whose people trace their lineage back to soldiers of the Macedonian army of Alexander the Great, left behind after his invasion of north India in 326 BCE.

Apostrophizing the apostrophe

An apostrophe is a punctuation mark used to indicate the omission of letters or numbers or to indicate the possessive case. It is also an exclamatory passage in a speech or poem, addressed to a person (often dead or absent) or thing (often personified). This sentence contains both usages by quoting the first line of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819): “Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness.”

Ada Kaleh: A lost way of life

Ada Kaleh (meaning “Island Fortress”) was a small island on the Danube peopled mostly by Turks. It was submerged in 1970 during the construction of the Iron Gates hydroelectric plant. In 1934 it was visited by the young English adventurer Patrick Leigh Fermor.

Bibliophiles unite: The end of the world is nigh!

The digital era is miraculous, but it has lamentable side effects – its impact on book lovers being one. Now, another renowned bookshop, Nicholas Hoare in Toronto, is closing its hallowed portals forever.

The never ending adventures of Pinocchio

The original tale of Pinocchio, the wooden boy whose adventures are familiar from the Walt Disney film, was censored in the same way as translations of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Today’s audiences are less sensitive, so can we look forward to a no-holds-barred portrayal of the badly behaved puppet?