Oh, the curse!

David Runciman: A home run, 19 February 2004

Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville: A Lifelong Passion for Baseball 
by Stephen Jay Gould.
Cape, 342 pp., £16.99, January 2004, 0 224 05042 7
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Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game 
by Michael Lewis.
Norton, 288 pp., $24.95, June 2003, 0 393 05765 8
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“... Baltimore, Tampa Bay). In the National League East, the ghastly Atlanta Braves (once owned by Ted Turner, now part of the AOL Time Warner empire) won their divisional title for a record 12th year in succession. By contrast, the 2003 post-season – the October sequence of play-offs between the best teams from the regular season that culminates in the World ...”

My God, they stink!

Seamus Perry: Wyndham Lewis goes for it, 5 December 2024

The Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: ‘Time and Western Man’ 
edited by Paul Edwards.
Oxford, 566 pp., £190, November 2023, 978 0 19 878583 5
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“... conceit’. Had Hulme survived the First World War, he wrote, ‘I should undoubtedly have played Turner to his Ruskin’; but as things transpired, he had to undertake both roles himself.Lewis also fought in the war, ‘an interminable nightmare’, including service at Passchendaele, ‘an epic of mud’. ‘I, figuratively, have never smiled again,’ he ...”
“... article.*More curiously, Christine Borland, one of the artists shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, has as one part of her exhibition at the Tate Gallery an installation devoted to the Sicilian Dwarf and the Irish Giant. The installation is called After a True Story – Giant and Fairy Tales, and is made up of four pieces, one on each wall. There ...”

Chasing Steel

Ian Jack: Scotland’s Ferry Fiasco, 22 September 2022

“... to be fitted lifeboats, the fizz of welding torches, the juddering of rivet guns. The shipyard of James Lamont and Co. bordered the castle on its upriver side. Downriver, and even closer, lay the Ferguson Brothers yard. The ships built at both yards were small – 300 feet long at most – and had humdrum purposes: ferries, tugs, minesweepers, dredgers, the ...”