Living in the digital age often appears akin to being trapped on board a starship with the controls set firmly for the heart of the sun. The feeling that it will all end badly is inescapable. Now, at the eleventh hour, comes Steffen Mau’s timely book, The Metric Society, sent here to reassure us that…

Byron Bruin Baer is a gentle giant, a clarinet player, a jazz musician and….a real, live bear. He likes to play his clarinet (“real good, for free”) under a cherry tree outside a flower shop opposite a tall-steepled church. He plays jazz for passing people all day, and sometimes in the evening too. The flower…

“Across the diocese from tower to tower, The church bells ring compelling power” It may seem unconscionably lazy to review an architectural field guide from an armchair, but a well-ordered, beautifully illustrated compendium of facts can make for compelling reading in its own right. W.E. David Ryan’s English Medieval Church Towers: The Northern Province[i] is…

“You’re going to Norway?” they all gasped with barely concealed incredulity. “Ooh, it’s awfully expensive there!” – they added with a sharp intake of breath. Moreover, I’d heard this reaction so often prior to departure from Edinburgh that I began to have night sweats worrying I’d be bankrupted by my trip to the land of…

The Guardian newspaper’s testament that ‘comment is free’ only holds so much water when you consider that we are already awash with so much ephemeral, ill-informed, and unsolicited opinion that it is eating up our valuable time and pushing it ‘into the red’. This is possibly because there are more far too many commentators and…