Books, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Six Degrees: From Knife to A Dark Adapted eye

The great chain of books – #6Degrees – how one book leads to another.  There’s an explanation of how all this works here.  Everyone is welcome to join in.  This is my contribution for April 2025: Our collective starting point is Salman Rushdie’s Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder  (2024). It’s a memoir that begins with a harrowing account of the murderous…

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Books, Politics, RattleBag and Rhubarb, The Sex Wars

Burning the Books and their Authors

This tweet about toasting marshmallows on a fire stoked with Harry Potters brought to mind an odd incident from my childhood. To the amusement of the world, my home town decided to ban a classic of medieval Italian literature as obscene and pornographic. The year was 1954 and book was Boccaccio’s Decameron. Until that point only three people in the…

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