Armando Iannucci, no stranger to comedy himself, looks at Dickens’s own sharp, and sharply observed, humour.
Tag: 01.02.12
Lord Byron, The Original Celebrity Diet Guru
“The ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’ Lord Byron was thought of as the embodiment of the ethereal poet, but he actually had a ‘morbid propensity to fatten’. Like today’s celebrities, he worked hard to maintain his figure. At Cambridge University, his horror of being fat led to a shockingly strict diet” of biscuits and soda water.
Does Bach In The Background Help You Learn Better?
“Within 15 minutes of hearing the lecture, all the students took a multiple-choice quiz featuring questions based on the lecture material. The results: the students who heard the music-enhanced lecture scored significantly higher on the quiz than those who heard the music-free version.”
Israel Philharmonic Sues Document Thief
“The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra submitted a request to a Jerusalem court last week to join the suit filed by the National Library against a collector who allegedly stole hundreds of valuable documents from their archives and put them up for sale on eBay.”
Indie Bookstores Begin Publishing Books Themselves
“Rather than trimming their sails, a number of independent booksellers are taking a page from Amazon by producing titles themselves” – in particular, books by local writers or of local or regional interest.