Tag Archives: coronavirus

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 14

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Patrick Miles

1 February I received an email from Sam1 (Russia) in a Moscow hospital. His whole family has gone down with COVID. The others are coping with it at home, but he was rapidly losing lung capacity and had to be … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Amazon, Andrew Tatham, Anton Chekhov, aphasia, Aphasia Awareness Month, Barack Obama, biographies, Black Crow, Calderonia, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, D.H. Lawrence, diaries, Edna Miles, Edna's Diary, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvey Pitcher, high blood pressure, John Pym, Ken Russell, language therapy, NHS, Russia, Sam&Sam, Sam1, Sam2, Sputnik, Stroke, Stroke Association UK, strokes, William Blake, Women in Love | 4 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 13

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Patrick Miles

18 December It feels like a new record: a week has passed since our, in their own words, ‘very striking’ advertisement of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius appeared in the TLS, and it hasn’t brought us a single sale! The line between self-justification … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged ABE, advertising, Amazon, Andrew Tatham, Battle of Loos, Battle of the Somme, biography, Brimstone, British Expeditionary Force, care homes, Charles Bartlett, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, D, Damian Grant, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, H. Lawrence, haiku, hare, I Shall Not Be Away Long, icicles, John Pym, Katy George, Ken Russell, Laurence Brockliss, Lev Tolstoi, Margaret Bartlett, marketing, Nice, publishing, Russia, Russian Studies, Russianists, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, spring, subventions, The Great War, Times Literary Supplement, TLS, War and Peace, winter, Women in Love, woodpecker, World War I | Leave a comment

Hello chronotopia old friend..?

Posted on December 4, 2020 by Patrick Miles

‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’, said Kierkegaard. Regrettably, this is of course true. We are like maggots, chewing our way relentlessly forwards through Time, but we are thinking maggots who constantly need to … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'Making Icons', 'real time', 'The Pearl', Albert Einstein, alliterative verse, Anglicanism, Anton Chekhov, Black Crow, Bungay, Cambridge University, Cambridgeshire, chronotopes, chronotopia, chub, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, creativity, Dante Alighieri, editing, glandular fever, Gustave Flaubert, icons, Ivan Turgenev, Leon Liddament, lockdowns, maggots, Mikhail Bakhtin, Nikolai Gogol, Norfolk, pandemics, psychosis, reading manuscripts, Russian Orthodoxy, Russians, Space, spacetime, stasis, students, Søren Kierkegaard, The Divine Comedy, The Fens, The Spectator, time, viruses, Walsingham | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 12

Posted on October 27, 2020 by Patrick Miles

26 September Today I suddenly realised what life under Black Crow reminds me of: living in the Soviet Union. It would be unfair to compare Britain at the moment to the view from a window in Moscow University’s Stalinist hostel … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged advertisements, Andrew Tatham, Bashō, chrysanthemums, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, dahlias, depression, freedom, garden gnomes, indie publishing, John Dewey, mental health, Moscow, Moscow State University, pandemic, psychosis, Reaktion Books, Rose Tremaine, Sam&Sam, Sam2, self-publishing, Times Literary Supplement, Twigs Way, USSR | Leave a comment

‘We need each other…’

Posted on October 15, 2020 by Patrick Miles

John Polkinghorne, physicist, priest, Fellow of the Royal Society and Founding President of the International Society for Science and Religion, will be 90 on 16 October. Patrick Miles recently interviewed him by Skype in his care home. Patrick Miles: Our … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged birthdays, care homes, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Charles Kingsley, Christianity, Church of England, church services, coronavirus, COVID-19, earthquakes, evolution, God, International Society for Science and Religion, Jane Austen, John Polkinghorne, music, New Testament, Origin of Species, pandemic, plate tectonics, Prayer Book, reading, Sam&Sam, science, social work, Templeton Prize, theodicy, theology, viruses, What Can We Hope For? | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 10

Posted on May 22, 2020 by Patrick Miles

7 April Walking home the three quarters of a mile or so from the centre of Cambridge, I saw six people and no cars. As in Georgio de Chirico’s surreal paintings, people are now weirdly visible even from a distance … Continue reading →

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Making Icons', Amazon, Catherine Arnold, Chaffinch, Charles Darwin, Charles Evelyn Pym, China, Clare Hopkins, comments, concatenation, coronavirus, COVID-19, Dave Spart, Etaples, Evey Pym, George Calderon, Georgio de Chirico, Goldfinch, Hampstead, hedgehogs, Hilaire Belloc, icons, Jack Pym, James Bloodworth, Jay, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Long-Tailed Tit, Ludgrove School, mining, Nature, pandemics, Private Eye, Rugeley, social clubs, Spanish Flu, squirrels, The Earth, The Great War, Violet Pym, viruses, working class, World War I | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 8

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Patrick Miles

13 March Within seven hours of my last post going up, the organisers of the 2020 conference of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) emailed everyone to say they were calling it off. Only an hour … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Archie Brown, BASEES, BASEES Conference, Black Crow, coronavirus, COVID-19, democracy, Edmund Burke, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Matthew Paris, Middlemarch, Mikhail Gorbachev, newspapers, parliamentarianism, philosophy, quarantine, Rodric Braithwaite, Sam&Sam, self-isolation, Sergei Esenin, The Spectator, The Times | 2 Comments

Bloggering on!

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Patrick Miles

It is such a long time since I blogged, that followers would be excused for forgetting why the previous post has been up for five weeks. The reason is that we have been preparing for Sam&Sam’s Moscow-Cambridge stall at the … Continue reading →