An inch wide and a mile deep
Hemingway’s celebrated explanation of how people go bankrupt: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
The Magic Circle’s motto Indocilis Privata Loqui means being ‘not apt to disclose secrets’.
The primary aim of magic as a performing art: the creation of a juxtaposition between the conviction that something cannot happen and the observation that it just has.
Love spells cast in Surrey in the last century; a witch in a bottle from Sussex found in 1926; and a lemon made in 1891 to bring about the death of a certain Mr William Smith, a greengrocer in Naples. All are displayed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, alongside Chinese wax figures stuck with pins, shamanic crowns and Sarawak spirit wands.
Ancient Greek has no word for blue
‘Sic transit gloria mundi’ is a Latin phrase that means ‘Thus passes worldly glory’
‘Over The Rainbow’ was the most popular piece of music in 1939, and has become shorthand for that bittersweet sense of being in tough times and walking towards better ones. Yip Harburg’s heartfelt lyrics speak of hope, but so does Harold Arlen’s music – and when the tune jumps a whole octave within the elongated “some-where” it flies over the metaphorical rainbow of seven notes to land on the eighth. And it’s that leap that really feels like the essence of hope: half rooted in reality, half up in the sky. Half present, half future. Part Kansas, part Oz. Matt Haig Guardian