High Table
“These suppers take place once a week in the vast refectories of each of the different colleges. The table at which the diners and their guests sit is raised up on a platform and thus presides over the… Read More
Knowing how not to swim
I have just picked up (and put down) a fat novel by a leading British novelist. It doesn’t matter which one. It was shortlisted for the Man Booker a few years ago. It’s meant to be a… Read More
Ricardo Blanco’s Blog
- The continuing recurrent imageA couple of weeks ago, in the town of Figueres, as I was about to cross the road by Plaça Catalunya, I spotted a van which bore a familiar motif. The design was strongly reminiscent of the cover... Read More
- What can a novelist learn from a nomadic reindeer herder?In Wayfinding, by Michael Bond, a fascinating account of how people find their way in and around the world (and the perils of GPS on our innate navigational systems), the author quotes a Siberian reindeer herder on how... Read More
- This One Sky DayIn her new novel, fifteen years in the making, the British-Jamaican author Leone Ross offers the reader an imagined island, like Coleridge’s caverns, measureless to man. The novel, taken as whole, is an infectious celebration of life, and... Read More
- The Indifferent Gaze‘All things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger.’ J.L. Borges The black bear appeared out of the woods to my left and lumbered across the... Read More
- The Welsh language might cause your plane to crashA recent article by travel writer Simon Calder has launched a small blaze of controversy about the use of the Welsh language on aircraft landing in Wales. The offending piece begins: “In the unlikely event you find yourself... Read More
Ricardo Blanco, Citizen of Nowhere
