Category: {miscellaneous}

Miscellaneous

Manchester bomb

It was ten years ago today that the IRA exploded a 3,300lb bomb in the centre of Manchester. Pictures below show the destruction in Corporation Street and the way the street looks now after several years’ rebuilding. 200 people were injured as police tried to evacuate the area. I was several miles away at the time but still heard the explosion. The truck containing the bomb was parked just by the postbox which nevertheless survived intact (well, they are made of cast iron).

Despite the devastation, most people now agree that the IRA did the city a favour by forcing large-scale rebuilding of an area spoiled by the bad retail architecture of the 1960s. The city would have changed over time anyway, it always has (and, indeed, still is); the bomb acted as a catalyst that forced the pace of that change.

bomb1.jpg

bomb2.jpg

Why “Feuilleton”?

A number of people have asked this question, perhaps inevitably. Aside from liking the sound of the word and enjoying obscure words in general, there’s some vague justification in applying the term to an online journal. The 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica has this to say:

FEUILLETON (a diminutive of the Fr. feuillet, the leaf of a book), originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers. Its inventor was Bertin the Elder, editor of Les Débuts. It was not usually printed on a separate sheet, but merely separated from the political part of the newspaper by a line, and printed in smaller type. In French newspapers it consists chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles; and its general characteristics are lightness, grace and sparkle. The feuilleton in its French sense has never been adopted by English newspapers, though in various modern journals (in the United States especially) the sort of matter represented by it is now included. But the term itself has come into English use to indicate the instalment of a serial story printed in one part of a newspaper.

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