BOOK BARN

#276.  WHERE YOU ARE.  Andrew Ziminski’s Church Going: A Stonemason’s Guide to the Churches of the British Isles  is a nice, knowing and readable book for anyone who cares for the topic.  It would fit very nicely in a pile with Robert McFarlane’s Landmarks , his book on the vanishing dialect vocabulary of the British earthscape, Patrick de Rynck’s How to Read A   Painting: Lessons from the Old Masters , for the many young people who grow up without knowing the classical and B

#275: LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION!  Reading around in classical history, you may well have run across references to a particular military troop of the city-state of Thebes, 300 soldiers—more specifically and unusually, 150 pairs of male lovers.  The rationale for this was the notion that no man would want to abandon his lover in the battlefield, or be seen by him in any act of cowardice.  The troop’s existence is attested to in Plutarch, in Xenophon and a few others; further evi

#274: ON THE HAIKU: MATSUO BASHO, R.H. BLYTH, KOBAYASHI ISSA AND RICHARD WRIGHT.  My discovery, made recently reading Judi Dench’s book on Shakespeare, that the “golden lads” and “chimney sweeps” in his elegy “Fear no more” (from Pericles ) were Warwickshire slang for dandelions, in bloom and in seeding, was a lovely reminder that the great poems can be inexhaustible wells, to be read for new discoveries as well as repeated pleasure.  Of all the great Japanese haiku undoubted