Yet another advantage of Hackney life

Children can observe that, unlike owner-following cartoon speed lines, blood lost by fleeing real-life stabbing victims forward-propagates: drops land and then spatter quite powerfully in the direction of travel. Hipsters can repeat the experiment with particularly viscous brews.

Borrowed glory

Tim Parks slags some prominent Italian-English literary translators and praises some lesser-known ones in the New York Review of Books: The problem is that it is hard for the wider public or even the critics really to know whether they have been given a good translation, and not easy even for the editors who have…