In last week's anniversary post I threw some barbs at social media to which this piece might act as a riposte; the poisoned waterholes still have their uses. A link on Bluesky to a book by James Hume-Cook, Australian Fairy Tales (1925), had me looking for more information about the book's illustrator, Christian Yandell (1894–1954), an Australian artist whose illustrations are as good as those being produced in Britain or America at the height of the boom in illustrated books.

opinion: The subtractive bias we're ignoring

The Silken World of Michelangelo (1967) by Eduardo Paolozzi. • "By the late 19th century, representing time as a line was not just widespread—it was natural. Like today, it would have been hard to imagine how else we could represent time. And this affected how people understood the world." Emily Thomas on the evolution of our thinking about the nature of time.

Numeral designs from 1904 by Reinier Willem Petrus de Vries. Monsieur Chat, the tutelary deity of the place with the lower-case French name in affected curly brackets, makes a rare appearance with the news that { feuilleton } is 20 years old today. The blog (a term I've always used with reluctance) was launched on the 13th of February, 2006, self-described as "A journal...cataloguing interests, obsessions and passing enthusiasms." The launch date was a random one, being the day that my new website went live, while the decision to start a blog was made not so much on a whim but out of a vague impulse that it might be something worth playing with for a while.

YouTube video by Dence Deca

As Kate Bush’s Wuthering Heights gets a boost from a new film adaptation, we survey the surprising, seditious and sensual ways in which prose has influenced pop

Fans of H. P. Lovecraft will rejoice in (and recoil from) these nineteen mesmerizing tales of cosmic horror. This long-awaited sequel to the bestselling anthology Lovecraft’s Monsters is once again pr...

Fifty years ago, Nik Cohn wrote the first great text on men’s fashion. Today There Are No Gentlemen— which took its title from a line offered by a...

Another short animation, a collage film from 1989 which concerns everyone's favourite Biblical megastructure, the Tower of Babel. Jan Mimra's film doesn't recount the creation of the building but uses the tower as a symbol for the human world, its history and its culture. The building itself is a hybrid structure made of architectural elements from the whole of human history, with a pyramid at the base and a platform at the summit supporting a collection of modern tower blocks.

Just after Christmas I watched the recent French film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, after which I resolved to finally read The Three Musketeers, something I'd been intending to do since reading The Count of Monte Cristo four years ago. I'm currently two thirds of the way through The Three Musketeers and enjoying it very much despite the familiarity of the story.