iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

IIRC, the 1960s history of the New Statesman argues that it was solvent because of decisions he took as chairman of its board (they inherited him from The Nation, a Liberal weekly, in a merger).

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

E.S. Turner's "Boys Will Be Boys" is very entertaining on British story magazines, if you haven't come across it. (But it is written for a 1960s audience assumed to share both Turner's affectionate contempt for those magazines and his contemptuous incomprehension of comics.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

The canonical statement, complete with mongrel as a compliment, may be a semi-obscene Daniel Defoe satirical poem, "The True Born Englishman", written in defence of importing a more congenial king from the Dutch: www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44081/...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

Frederic Raphael also attempted a 1997 sequel, which appeared in the UK Prospect magazine (in an issue with Beerbohm's caricature of Soames on the cover): www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/book...

prospectmagazine.co.uk

Son of Enoch

Enoch Soames, Max Beerbohm's classic 1912 story, has a sequel. Enoch had a son, Methuselah, who was waiting for him in the British Museum on 3rd June ...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Did you see the (I think it's a reproduction now) metal ring marking the site of the tree somewhere near that end of the Park that was cut down by Gladstone? (Apologies, enjoying the opportunity to be nerdy about these things.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Nice that the Royal Children is open again. I would recommend taking in one of the pubs with cave rooms carved into the sandstone at the back — the Trip is the one everyone will point you at, but this is or was also true of the Hand and Heart at the other end of the centre.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

There is at least one corner of London where these exist — lots of West African and South American food appears to get cooked on them, from the tempting smells I've sometimes cycled past: www.southwark.gov.uk/culture-and-...

southwark.gov.uk

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 14/04/2026

My understanding is that the fanciest washing machines are harder and more expensive to fix, but that could have been a repair guy trying to make me feel better about our less fancy one.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

What a fascinating thing! Pre-1990 phone number and pre-late-80s masthead! (May still have been used later, of course.) I believe that paragraphing rule was standard for things given to newspaper typesetters; maybe your manuscript was meant to go straight through to setting...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

AFAICT this is about "A-format," the size highbrow British readers associate with older Penguins. There used to be a separate wider distribution network for it in Britain too - the system that brought romance novels to newsagents - but I think it hit a wall sooner.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

Yep. The Penguin shop will sell you one new for slightly over 900 quid, or the later, squarer version in one of several colours for 700 and something. I think the middle gap takes your newspaper, or did.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Apologies, condensed milk not evaporated (works even worse if you inadvertently boil a tin of sweetcorn instead, as my grandmother once did - though she switched pudding plan after opening the tin)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 11/02/2026

Making dulce de leche yourself - by cooking a tin of evaporated milk for two hours before you open it - is the great gimmick of the original banoffee recipe, though I don't think it mentions that what you've made is called dulce de leche

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

One odd exception here is that travel guides can become compulsive reading once they're *sufficiently* outdated. I treasure my @kirkdalebooks.bsky.social bargain-bin copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to Eastern Europe on a Shoestring (first edition, April 1989), to which that probably happened fast.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

I've heard it, and it probably existed in British English once too, because it survived in printers' pronunciation of the old named type sizes. ("Long Primer" was c. 10pt, "Great Primer" c. 18pt; 9pt was Bourgeois, pronounced "Burjoyce", and 6pt "Nonpareil", said "Nomprul".)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Not much else around there iirc, which assuming no one will let you touch the agricultural land might make both that and the "build houses!" alternative trickier than the station position would suggest. (Caveat: Don't know the area really, though I have got lost in it trying to cycle to Nottingham.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

These are fascinating, thank you! It reads as if the primary enforcement mechanism — explicitly in England and implicitly in the U.S. text — was the threat of confiscating luggage, with cash up front as a fallback where that wouldn't answer.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

What a strange, ominous thing! There appears to be an "option to buy" the paperback, but only after you've rented it ($54.99 for a semester). And a crossed-out "list price" another link away of $114.99, without a clear sense of what that's the list price for...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Think DA also didn't follow right turns by some of his mates during his lifetime. (I remember being delighted and then sad to find Michael Bywater's personal website, which at that time had a fair amount of "Global warming? Pah!" on it. This is vague memory rather than a proper sense of anything.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Thank you — was guessing so, and sorry for jumping in.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

If one reads it as "about 25% *each* of..." both the arithmetic and the way of breaking down the numbers make more sense. (Which isn't to say that's right, of course.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 25/09/2025

I don't think I'm anywhere near the curves, but I read the newsletter and would be interested.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

For writing this, the gods sent me a puncture, and then the loveliest interaction I've had with a shop of any kind in some time (Lindo 2 Wheels, the tiny and wildly overstuffed toy and bike shop in Sydenham)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

In the good version, you're talking to someone who resents being taken from fixing a thing they love in order to sell you a thing they also love and that they expect you to besmirch and break. The bad version involves a separate salesperson who has absorbed that attitude but lacks the knowledge.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 14/09/2025

Given the apparent effect of rumours about replacing Reeves, the level of potential economic silliness required to set off a panic might not be very high...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

Nothing to apologise for, replied just as you were sending this - wonderful to have enthused, and to have been thanked

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

That's a great one, and it's what I meant when I was taking about rewriting "Annus Mirabilis"! (Sex began "Between end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles' first LP", per the Larkin poem.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

She is a remarkable lyricist in general (I Don't Really Care For You, on the first album, has the line "Oh the Marian Keyes of it all!' *and* a verse that rewrites Larkin's "Annus Mirabilis" and gets away with it.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 05/09/2025

The son's are exactly what you would imagine a Mr Men book would be, if you didn't have much imagination. The dad's, while awful, are weirder than that.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

You may both have read this — I'm almost certain Richard has — but the LRB had a memorable Jenny Turner report from a previous Battle of Ideas: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v3...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

I should have known it would have been the Dragon! (And not assumed it was a bloke, too.)

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

As someone who used to live next to the Broxtowe border - the wall would presumably run through that derelict golf course up from Bramcote Lane shops - it really doesn't make sense to have boundaries that treat that bit and Beeston as Not Nottingham.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

I remember @cricketerik.bsky.social, who then covered pubs in Nottingham, talking about this at the time, and quoting a landlord as saying, "It's like the government built me an extension."

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 24/08/2025

The flavour of it is definitely American right-wing. Original coinage appears to be as Bush Derangement Syndrome in 2003, by Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 20/08/2025

The question "How would a reasonable person interpret this?" isn't so helpful when someone is speaking to a carefully assembled audience of unreasonable people...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

It also refers to what appears to be a regular column in The Times: share.google/inW9XOuepHMb...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

You may need a correction of your own here - the fonts strongly suggest that was from The Times

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

I had a years long accumulation of the cheapo version (Sten, later renamed Gorm to further discourage the price-sensitive) and it ended up with a sort of forced perspective effect from the pieces gradually getting thinner and then shorter.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 16/08/2025

British Transport Police managed to get themselves a small queue at The Greatest Gathering (big railway event earlier this month) by the ruthless expedient of "Bring your car and let the kids press the blue light button."

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

When I volunteered in an Oxfam bookshop, the official definition of classic in the very detailed and thought-through pricing and classification manual was: The author is dead.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Could you be thinking of Italo Calvino? His "Invisible Cities" features Trude, the noncontiguous but inescapable city to which all airports belong.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

Historical fiction often dates quicker. People still read Thackeray and George Eliot; I don't think many read "Henry Esmond" or "Romola". But things may be different when you're talking about America and its founding fathers.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 12/08/2025

And then people would complain about your plan to block out the sun. Just can't win.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Ali Smith has used coruscate as a transitive verb, with a meaning something like "lacerate verbally"; but I haven't seen that extra step catch on more widely yet.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 28/07/2025

Lots of mills now have a community around them in the sense that they're maintained and run by volunteers — was one of the enjoyable things about visiting www.greensmill.org.uk, even with the sails out of action. May we all survive long enough for old wind turbines to attract similar posses.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

More than 2,000 Austin Sevens, and 19 Austin Montegos.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

My understanding is that early BBC interviews were deferential. It's ITN — the national news service for ITV — that changes things, and specifically Robin Day as its star interviewer. He was an ex-barrister and IIRC talked about modelling his approach on courtroom cross-examination.

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

The definitive answer just popped up again elsewhere on this site: bsky.app/profile/call...

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Peter Robins @petrobins.bsky.social · 12/07/2025

Respect but also monitor for further potential signs of radicalised Geoffrey Boycott fandom, I'd say

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