Helen Andrews

The Washington Post  is going to have to sit in the back of the class for a while, because they let this howler slip through to the final version of “ Christians Join Fight Against Cockfighting ”: Smith’s organization [the Palmetto Family Council] has produced a video that . . . . Continue Reading »

It may sound like a funny premise for a film, but a Turkish director wants to make a movie about Ottoman aid to Ireland during the Great Famine. It’s basically your run-of-the-mill unlikely friendship movie — Fried Green Potatoes , if you will. Also, charming old Ireland has been given . . . . Continue Reading »

A man in Zimbabwe was arrested yesterday when, during a routine roadblock and police search, he was found to be carrying a sack of four Gaboon vipers on a bus. Mathew Aidini, 23, was bringing the snakes to Harare in order to sell them to what The Zimbabwean refers to as “an undisclosed . . . . Continue Reading »

He did not wear his scarlet coat,      For blood and wine are red, And blood and wine were on his hands      When they found him with the dead . . . But the coat worn by Charles Thomas Wooldridge, the unnamed hangee of “The Ballad of Reading . . . . Continue Reading »

This 200-page history of the Oxford Union preserves undergraduate wit with enormously greater permanence than it is in undergraduate wit’s nature to be preserved. Try telling a college student that a joke he made yesterday — for example, “The honourable gentlemen have turned their . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the start of the new year, I’ve given away dozens of books from my library, for free, to people I know. First I put all the books I planned on keeping into three boxes, then I filled my bookcase at work with as many of the rest as I could fit and sent a memo . . . . Continue Reading »

La langue de bois , “the wooden tongue,” is a very useful French term for platitudinous windbaggery that combines the worst qualities of politician-speak and bureaucratese. This non-language is generally used when functionaries — up to and including heads of state — have . . . . Continue Reading »

From Radical Joe: A Life of Joseph Chamberlain , a reminiscence from his primary-school teacher: At one time, they wanted to get up a ‘Peace Society.’ I was very much against it, as I felt sure it would stir up quarrels among them, and they were of course forbidden to fight. However, . . . . Continue Reading »

A list compiled after being stumped by reference to an “equitable mustache” in Looking for a Ship and then turning to  Google Books with mischievous intent. All of these are real. amiable equanimous tetragrammatonic guileless competent sincere white inquiring drooping dihedral . . . . Continue Reading »

Shiva Naipaul is not as well known as his Nobel-laureate brother, but a devoted minority considers him the better writer, and I do not think there can be much question that he is the only Naipaul with a sense of humor visible to the human eye. He is also the more tragic of the two. Shiva died of a . . . . Continue Reading »