A friend of mine, also called Isabel, is a fan of Alexander McCall Smith. So when I saw “Friends, Lovers, Chocolate” in a book corner, I picked it up without much thinking. Isabel is an unusual heroine. She is an independent academic philosopher, just like Schopenhauer: inherited wealth permitted her to pursue the busy editorship of the fictional “Review of Applied Ethics” with little pay. In form, “Friends, Lovers, Chocolate” is very loosely a detection novel: Isabel’s pursuit of a puzzle pushes the plot forward....

I read the book on a phone screen, courtesy of Project Gutenberg. Unlike some readers in “Agatha Christie: 100 Years of Poirot and Miss Marple”, I didn’t try hard to work out the puzzle. It felt early on that many of the clues were just too specific to the time and place: they rely on technologies (letters; chemists’ vials) and a society (class divide) that I don’t have an intuition for....

The film was not what I expected at all. There was not a lot of Tetris and a lot of cold war. Every line from the Robert Maxwell character seems to be as obvious as can be. I wonder whether it was deliberate: either way I enjoyed the comic value! The fact that I watched the film with a Tetris enthusiast added a lot of pleasure to the experience. I wonder what corporate/intellectual property lawyers make of the film: what does a “contract” granting the rights to Tetris actually mean, when the government in question is already falling apart?...

I first tried Paradise Lost as a student, eager to dig into all the references and understand the greatness of the great work. That didn’t last very long. The gathering of Demons had too many references and allusions, and soon I was lost in the reeds and lost interest. Yet somehow or other, Paradise Lost came back to my life. One of my colleagues studied English at university and had a habit of making impressive quotations from it in conversation....

In this short book, Brown seeks to turn our contemporary ideas of happiness on its head. Brown’s target is a certain brand of modern self-help, where an alleged “law of attraction” is put forward to suggest that the more you desire something (money, status, power), the universe automatically responds to your desire and the object of desire materialises. In other words, you need only wish for happiness for you to be happy....

I had picked up Fergus Butler-Gallie’s hugely enjoyable “Field guide to the English clergy” when it first came out in Hatchards bookshop, Piccadilly, London. It was the perfect book for the Anglophile. One of the many charming aspects of English elite institutions is the continued presence of the Established Church. Most Oxbridge colleges boast a beautiful chapel, the overwhelming majority of which are under Church of England management. Similarly for the Inns of Court and the Houses of Parliament....

1 How I fell into this rabbit hole (In what comes below, out of convenience I will refer to Ziwei Doushu (紫微斗數) as “Astrology” or “Chinese Astrology”.) I came across Ip Hon Leung’s books about Ziwei doushu, a school of Chinese astrology, quite by chance. I had just started moving from Hong Kong to the UK, but still had a lot of chances to return from time to time. One thing I will miss about Hong Kong is the easy availability of the public libraries, with their collection of Chinese books....

This is a place to collect my long spiels on various subjects, so that I don’t drone on about them with friends.