In honor of St. Patrick’s Day I pulled from my shelf this book of Stories and Myths from the North West of Ireland by Michael B. Roberts. Last summer I bought it at the Liber Bookshop in Sligo just a … Continue reading
A Flap of Nuns isn’t the title of a book on my bookshelf. The term is one of the collective nouns in James Lipton’s classic An Exaltation of Larks. I use it here as a means of confession that I … Continue reading
My favorite childhood book was never on my own childhood bookshelf. I borrowed Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome from my local library and enjoyed it so much that in subsequent weeks I checked out all the other books in … Continue reading
Quite why my eyes should rest on The Domesday Book out of all my history books this morning I can’t quite say. But perhaps it had something to do with the fact that yesterday I inadvertently ended up watching the … Continue reading
This little book is a new addition to my bookshelf, acquired on this year’s summer trip to London. After a walk around St. James’s Park we visited the Churchill War Rooms, the secret underground headquarters where Winston Churchill and his … Continue reading
At a dinner party in Berkeley some years ago I met a visiting history professor from the University of Leuven in Flanders. Naturally I told him I am half Flemish. When I tell people that they usually just assume that … Continue reading
Strictly speaking this book is no longer on my bookshelf, though for many years it lived with a collection of old children’s books in my daughter’s former bedroom. Back in the 1980’s when my children were small my mother brought … Continue reading
