Postcards from Lucerne
Adam J Taylor
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Postgraduate researcher in The School of Pharmacy at The University of Nottingham.
Vices include épée, wine, opera and Evensong.
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This is my personal site and as such may not represent the views of my institution or funding bodies.
“Little did I realise that the only reason why anyone listens to Front Row is that it comes on after the Archers and the listener has forgotten to switch the radio off in time!”
Josh Ritter — Why
Featured on the forthcoming six-track EP Bringing in the Darlings (via Paste)
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
It’s always great to hear the grand piano in the atrium of the med school being played.
“Around this time, I was summoned to London to meet C. P. Snow, the author of the classic series of novels Strangers and Brothers, who was also a non-executive director of English Electric and who wished to meet a number of people still employed by the company who had been through the various training schemes; my appointment fell during his lunch break and I was interviewed as he consumed his sandwiches. I use the word “interview” advisedly because he was seeking answers to a series of questions and cut me short when I started to discuss something with him. I didn’t think much of him, although I have always enjoyed his books.”
— My grandfather on meeting C. P. Snow
It was a beautiful day to escape the doldrums of a Sunday in the lab and stomp around the lake on campus with a friend. The relative scarcity of snow always makes it such a joy.
“Most of the rest, when one had tried to probe for what books they had read, would modestly confess, ‘Well, I’ve tried a bit of Dickens’, rather as though Dickens were an extraordinary esoteric, tangled and dubiously rewarding writer, something like Ranier Maria Rilke.”
— C. P. Snow in The Two Cultures on interviewing 40,000 or so scientists and engineers in the years during and after WWII. Particulaty noteworthy, as my maternal grandfather was one of that group.
“For constantly I felt I was moving among two groups—comparable in intelligence, identical in race, not grossly different in social origin, earning about the same income, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate had so little in common that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean”
— C. P. Snow in his opening to The Two Cultures. Apt, having spent the evening at Burlington House
