http://textualities.net Online Literary Magazine Thu, 01 Jan 2009 19:16:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Scotland seems an unlikely place for looking into the history and variety of playing cards. Its tradition would seem, at first sight, likely to frown on such things. But Peter Bruschi, the Dutch or possibly German engineer who, in 1681, set up the first supply of piped water in Edinburgh, ... http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/the-history-of-playing-cards/ JR What sort of books particularly impressed themselves on your imagination when you were a boy? AG The books that excited me dramatically also excited me visually - as did children's comics, the Dandy and the Beano, and the early and greatest Disney films, Snow White, Bambi, Pinocchio, Dumbo Jumbo ... http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/remembering/ When I was a little girl I dreamed that one day I would join a circus and be the lady on the flying trapeze. It wasn't to be. I get dizzy if I stand on a chair. My long-forgotten, sequinned dream came back to me when I met Cilla Birt, ... http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/circus/ You're not too good at arithmetic. Oh, am Ah not? Well you managed to get the fourth part of a trilogy! Ah added up my books and got it wrong. And then Ah discovered Douglas Adams had a four-part trilogy to the Hitch-hikers Guide. Ah'll need to do five now - a five-part ... http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/a-conversation-with-john-byrne/ One Christmas Eve I switched on the radio - it must have been near midnight - and I heard lines from an unattributed poem followed almost immediately by a choir singing to orchestral accompaniment an unattributed piece of music. I recognised the poem at once for it had always been ... http://textualities.net/eileen-crerar-gilbert/for-tessa-at-seventy-2/ In 1950 a monograph on Bernard Shaw by A.C. Ward was published for the British Council and the National Book League by Longmans, Green and Co as the first Writers and Their Work pamphlet. Who would have imagined that almost sixty years later the series would still be going strong? ... http://textualities.net/michael-lister/writers-and-their-work/ Michael Lister As far as primers, literary guides or introductions go, this 'critical caper' belongs in a class of its own. Contrived to introduce to a new, younger generation the delights of Spark's oeuvre, it is out of the run-of-the-mill. It almost defies description. Insightful and irreverent, flippant and engaging, incisive ... http://textualities.net/michael-lister-discusses-murie/a-cheeky-wee-book/ caught weeping in the town centre leaning. Beside a dusty monument with a hauf-eaten sandwich at his feet and a mouthfulfalling fae his mouth he thought that moment significant in his history leastways faras the relationship with mumndad went. Ndad came over all embarrassed n said wotr you doin? Asked ... http://textualities.net/roy-macgregor/caught-weeping/ When Keats wrote that 'a thing of beauty is a joy forever', he might very well have been anticipating the pamphlet publications of the Cahiers Series, the first of which is now complete and represents an achievement that will 'never pass into nothingness'. Already embarked on Book Two, Sylph ... http://textualities.net/michael-lister/the-cahiers-series/ Poem by Eddie Gibbons. © Eddie Gibbons http://textualities.net/eddie-gibbons/a-diamond-in-the-district/