I'm A Sucker For Interiors And Carefully,

From My Music Training, I Knew That, Some Spanish Rhythms Apart, 5/4 Is A Time Signature Used Only In The Modern Era. Holst's Mars From The Planets Is 5/4. But If You Speak Lines Of Poetry In That Pattern You Just End Up Hitting The Off-beats. It's Only When You Add A Rest - A Sixth Beat - That It Sounds As It Surely Should Sound.

I Wrote About World War Ii Because I Didn't Understand It. I Think That's The Reason That Historians Are Drawn To Any Subject - There's Something About It That Doesn't Make Sense. I Wanted To Work My Way Through What Happened Slowly, And Look At Everything In The Order In Which It Took Place.

A Problem That I Have With Everything Fictional Is That Writers Are Always Having To Come Up With Sudden Artillery Explosions In The Middle Of Whatever Is Going On. The Characters Are Having Interesting, Subtle Interactions, Or Jealousies, Or Whatever It Is, And Suddenly Some Gigantic Angry Eruption Has To Happen, A Giant Gasp Where Everyone Has To Scramble Around. That's The Point Where I'm Turned Off. I Want The Dynamic Range To Be A Little Smaller. I Don't Like The Big False Bangs.

There's A Time And Place For The Kindle, And I Own One Now And Have Books On It That I Don't Otherwise Have. But I Don't Find That My Hand Reaches Out For It The Way It Does For A Trade Paperback, Or (in The Middle Of The Night) For The Ipod Touch.

I Did Not Know That The Planning For Biological And Chemical Warfare Was So Widespread In England, And Even In France Before France Fell. It Was News To Me That There Had Been Talk, Even In The First World War, Of Dropping Colorado Beetles On German Potato Crops And That Kind Of Thing.