" Is there a way of contributing to email conversations that allows you to make your contribution easy to find for people who've been following the discussion, while preserving the entire thread for the benefit of people who are new to it?"

"So, not without a few tears, I threw away some twenty thousand words of perfectly good copy about the Sri Lankan civil war..."

Pete speculates about the crisis.

fanvid of monsters from the black and white era of Doctor Who.

Maybe not all 31 are genuinely essential, but one or two look useful.

For the two of you who are interested and haven't seen this yet!

Taking a ferry from Ukraine to Georgia.

Yet more appalling behaviour by Amazon.

The best headline I've seen for this widely-posted story.

This got quite a lot of comments when I posted it elsewhere, but for some reason forgot to list it here.

Particularly entertaining because the author's views are so peculiar that I could easily mistake him for a troll in some circumstances. But he gets the taxonomy about right.

An exhaustive list of literary treatments of this important topic.

A true story of real-life Harry Potter fan-fic.

Of course, this is only stating that 70% of British men and 50% of European men have a common direct male ancestor with Tutankhamun in the last 9500 years. In fact taking all lineages into account we are probably all descended from any of his close relatives who have any living descendants at all. (King Tut himself is believed to have outlived bot…

Smuggling coffee into Sudan

I'm glad to say that by the time I was a sporadic student journalist, computers had already taken over. But my teenage fanzine publications were a different matter...

One person's solution, well argued, with boxes ticked.

Provides access to two online historic atlases : The Irish Famine Population Data Atlas 1841-2002 and The Atlas of Irish Famine Data 1841 - 1851. Fascinating stuff.

"the return rate on some Android devices is between 30 and 40 percent" - I am not at all surprised!

"I came across an odd PG Wodehouse story yesterday, ‘The Castaways’...it reads like Kafka, without quite the same volume of brooding dread."

Trouble at the Henry Jackson Society.

"Frankly, my sense is that The Story of the Treasure Seekers may be entirely wasted on children."

What is your favourite? 7? 37? 10/√2?

"I remember watching Christopher Eccleston and David Tennant with her already, experiencing the show through her eyes… but she was three and four years old, and she doesn’t remember them now that she is a big girl of six. "

"It is only through sensationalism and fear mongering that the topic of Islamic terrorism is allowed to be used to demonize a religious community that happens to be a minority in the West. "

CONTENTS Editors' Introduction ; References and AbbreviationsPart I: The Major Intertexts - Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice - Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre - Georgette Heyer, A Civil Contract - Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night - William Shakespeare Part II: 'A comedy of biology and manners' Part III: Annotations, by chapter Afterword: LMB's continuin…

Why Christopher Eccestone left: "My face didn’t fit and I’m sure they were glad to see the back of me. The important thing is that I succeeded. It was a great part. I loved playing him. I loved connecting with that audience. "

I must say I've signed up but am barely using it.

"Riding the Underground back to Great Portland Street, I felt an unexpected sense of exhilaration. I had experienced not just a visit to a new clinic, but an unfamiliar paradigm of medicine — one in which health care is abundant, easily available, and affordable, rather than scarce, expensive, and a hassle for both the patient and the doctor."

"Belgium’s law banning the face-veil and other forms of face covering is badly drafted, unnecessary, and counter-productive" - I am proud to have voted for one of the authors of this piece in last year's election.