Shakespeare and Shoes
As a schoolboy in Cape Town in the 1960s, I lapped up books by the American satirical writer, Richard Armour, the author who once reminded us that libraries are “places where you lower your voice and raise your mind”. Although the racially-segregated libraries of apartheid South Africa symboli
The Bengal Boer
The monthly British periodical, The Oldie, has a column called ‘I Once Met’. The magazine’s aged readers are encouraged to put down their walking sticks, stop chewing their false teeth, dust off their memories and submit tales of chance encounters with the famous–or notorious–faces of thei
Cannibalism in Oxford
While recently reading a lip-smacking review of Bill Schutt’s entertaining new history of cannibalism, Eat Me (2017), I was reminded of a hair-raising epicurean moment in an Oxford seminar room. In 1987, I participated in the Sixth International Oral History Conference on ‘Myth and History’, a
