হিমাদ্রি চ্যাটার্জী Himadri Chatterjee

This book is on a subject very close to my heart, and I can only hope my love of these plays come through. As well as my thoughts on them, of course. You may order it from contubernalesbooks.com/essays-on-ibsen , or from amzn.eu/d/bX9nj2t .

@AloneInBerlin11 @nguyenhdi I get the feeling with Dombey & Son that Dickens was moving away from the freewheeling, improvisatory style of his earlier novels, and was aiming for something quite different; and that this is a sort of novel of transition.

@hairygit @nguyenhdi I read Dombey a very long time ago but I still remember Miss Tox and her disappointment. The simile of the barber and the paupers is brilliant

.@nguyenhdi writee about Dombey and Son, & challenges the unthinking mantra that Dickens couldn’t “write women”. The little white attic : Dombey and Son: “I have nothing else to sustain me when I despise myself” thelittlewhiteattic.blogspot.com/2026/05/dombey…

@richmondie @nguyenhdi I’m actually OK with stylised dialogue!

@hairygit @nguyenhdi Excellent. I love Edith even if she does talk like a play

@AmandaPCraig @tls I suppose it’s a measure of how far we’ve come that we now find this jaw-droppingly shocking. But nonetheless … it’s jaw-droppingly shocking.

A good elucidation by Gwendoline Riley of what she found “sad” in Beryl Bainbridge’s attitude to rape and child abuse @TLS. It was/is typical of that generation, I fear.

*writes, not writee

@jepaco The Arden series certainly is very good, but I haven’t done any serious comparison with other series, except casual browsing in bookshops.

@hairygit I've been meaning to look into what editions are the best. Do you consider that to be the Arden?

I have the complete 2nd edition, and have a number of duplications in the 3rd. I don’t have to revamp my Shakespeare library all over again, do I?

@cjsarett I increasingly feel with James, especially with late James, that the uncertainty is not merely the uncertainty in our perceptions, but also that which is an inherent aspect of what we perceive; and that, therefore, to see anything as clear & unambiguous is to misapprehend it.

@hairygit Oh, I didn’t imagine you were criticizing. James, I think, is part of a larger arc in narrative (e.g., Rashomon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, The Good Soldier, etc) that’s grappling with relativism/etc.

Henry James has the uncanny ability of making things more unclear the more he scrutinises.

@cjsarett Oh, I'm not criticising. I love James, especially late James.

@hairygit But isn’t that like life? The more we look, the more greys and nuances and possibilities we see?

@DeborahLoudon I have both. The 2nd edition didn't do the poems, & the 3rd edition of Love's Labour's Lost is far better than the 2nd for helping readers like me, who haven't had a classical education, appreciate some of the learned wordplay. Do please say "thank you" to your husband from me!

@wool1111 It's strange how tastes & sensibilities change with age. When I was young, I didn't use to care much for James, but with passing years, he has assumed for me a far greater importance - especially those last three elusive novels. I'm not sure why.

@hairygit i love james but have never managed to get through this in multiple attempts - even gore vidal's take on it couldn't motivate me sufficiently

@disagilities @MuseZack No modern translator of Homer I know of uses "archaic English". Fitzgerald, Lattimore, Rieu, Fagles, Hammond, Green, etc. all use modern English.

@MuseZack People knock the Emily Wilson translations, but they're great if you don't like archaic English. I figure if you're gonna translate, use language people will understand. Of course this probably outs me as a midwit.

The wonderful Robert Fagles translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey have audiobook narrations by Derek Jacobi and Ian McKellen and listening to them is every bit as great as you'd think it would be.

@colinb8 @nguyenhdi Guerdon! Pah!

@hairygit @nguyenhdi Yup! My 1st memory of "remuneration" in Shakespeare is a Brownsea Open Air Theatre (good amateur company) production on Brownsea Island in Poole Harbour. We travelled on boats. In 2025 they relocated to the mainland: -No longer on an island +Easier access brownsea-theatre.co.uk

Back here for 5 minutes just to show off that I scored 7/7 in the Plants & Shakespeare quiz 😀 riddle.com/embed/share/tw…

@RichardLafette I collected the 2nd edition in my student days, & remain very attached to it. As well as the ones you mention, I love Harold Jenkins' Hamlet, with the long notes virtually a sequence of essays. I also like the 3rd edition of Hamlet printing the Quarto & Folio texts separately.

@hairygit No, of course not. Some of the scholarship in the second editions will never be equalled. Kermode’s Tempest, Brooke’s MND and Muir’s Lear being obvious examples.

@colinb8 @nguyenhdi Love’s Labour’s Lost

@nguyenhdi I got 4/7. On which Shakespeare play or plays is the word "remuneration" used several times?

@_Sam_Trades_ @VarunBaboria1 @Rainmaker1973 Sure, there have been many injustices of this nature. Women have been hard done by as well in this respect: Rosalind Franklin, Lise Meitner, Jocelyn Bell Burnell (and others too I can’t think of right now off the top of my head) were also arguably snubbed.

@hairygit @VarunBaboria1 @Rainmaker1973 But they had to be white before 1930s to even be considered. CV Raman was first to get it but real story behind it is ugly. Though Rutherford recommended - Raman had to bend his back to him to get a nomination & did not add Raman's assistant name who co-invented.

He was Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist whose quiet brilliance in the 1920s forever altered our understanding of the quantum world. In 1924, Bose, then a 30-year-old professor in British India, sent a groundbreaking manuscript directly to Albert Einstein. The paper offered a novel, more elegant derivation of Planck's law for blackbody radiation by treating light quanta (photons) as indistinguishable particles—a radical departure from classical statistical methods. Impressed by its insight, Einstein personally translated the work into German and facilitated its publication in the prestigious Zeitschrift für Physik. This exchange sparked a brief but profound collaboration. Einstein extended Bose's statistical approach to material atoms, predicting a bizarre new state of matter at ultra-low temperatures: what we now call a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC), where particles behave as a single quantum wave. Bose's original framework became known as Bose-Einstein statistics, and the class of particles that obey it—those with integer spin, including photons, gluons, W and Z bosons, and the Higgs boson—was later named bosons in his honor by Paul Dirac. Unlike fermions (matter particles like electrons), which obey the Pauli exclusion principle and cannot occupy the same quantum state, bosons can pile into identical states en masse. This "social" behavior underpins extraordinary macroscopic phenomena: the coherent light of lasers, the zero-resistance flow in superconductors, and the collective quantum coherence in BECs. Despite the monumental impact—his statistics describe half of all fundamental particles and enabled key advances in quantum field theory, condensed matter physics, and particle physics—Bose remained remarkably unassuming. He continued teaching at universities in Dhaka and Calcutta (now Kolkata), mentored students, pursued ideas in X-ray crystallography, unified field theory, and other areas, and never sought the spotlight. Nominated several times for the Nobel Prize (notably for Bose-Einstein statistics and his later work), he was never awarded it, and his name rarely appears in popular accounts of 20th-century physics. There's a poignant humility in his story: a man whose legacy literally names one of the two fundamental families of particles in the universe, yet whose personal fame never matched the scale of his contribution. Bose reminds us that true influence often arrives without fanfare. Some breakthroughs echo through textbooks and technologies, while their creators work in the background, content to let the universe carry their ideas forward—even if history's spotlight rarely finds them.

@MartyRossWriter Yes, absolutely. His ability to suggest all kinds of things without confirming any of them is ideal for ghost stories.

@hairygit That's why he's so good at ghost stories.

@AliceStainer Oh, I’m definitely a fan. He is depicting not merely the uncertainties of perception, but also the uncertainties inherent in the nature of what is being perceived. I love his works, especially the last three novels.

@hairygit I'd say rather that he makes it infinitely clearer that life's parameters are by no means clearly delineated, for the most part. Paradoxically, certain outlines also emerge with clarity: e.g. if you stand back from the intricacies of WOTD, there's a certain starkness of vision.

@ApmNeill Saw it on Sunday. Plan to go a few more times while it’s still on.

Just back from London and Jeremy Robbins’ Zurbaran book waiting. Looking forward to this. Also the Zurbaran exhibition catalogue is excellent 💙

@VarunBaboria1 @Rainmaker1973 Meghnad Saha, CV Raman, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, all won the Nobel Prize for physics. Sateen Bose would have been a worthy recipient, as would have been his namesake, Jagdish Bose.

@Rainmaker1973 He had to be white to win a Nobel Prize. Didn’t he?