colophon

Philip Larkin once wrote something that I was very taken with, to the effect that you could come to his poetry without any external knowledge. Of course you can read the Iliad without knowing that Paris had been tricked into judging women, and that Eris was the Gavrilo Princip of the Trojan War. But the original audience would have known, and it does help.

What we have here is not like Larkin’s poetry. Originally a series of emails to my workmates it assumed that you would know who, where, and what I was writing about and I provided links where I was unsure as to the depths of your denseness. So although it isn’t exactly a multi-media creation it was always meant to be read on some device. It does lose a bit if you don’t know the school and its politics, but there’s nothing I can really do about that, short of explaining, which I’m not going to do.

technical stuff

• The body text is Baskerville, for the headings I use the Amaranth font by Gesine Todt courtesy Google fonts, other text is Segoe UI.
• Links will open in a new tab. Internal links are marked with a ‡, links with a pop-up are marked with a †.
• The names, of course, would be known, and would have meant something to my original audience. I’ve decided that it would be unfair if I revealed here what that was. In most cases I don’t think that it really matters.
• I don’t set any cookies so there are no annoying pop-ups asking you to approve them.
• I’ve resisted doing too much editing of the original pieces. Where I have added anything I’ve marked it with a ✒ mark.
• Please don’t bother me because I use –ize spelling. It’s the Oxford spelling that I like the look of better. It is not American.
• The pictures, unless otherwise marked, are my own and licensed under Creative Commons. The javascript/css is GPL licensed. I retain normal copyright on everything else, but, unless you do something utterly outrageous, I’m unlikely to sue you.
• Can you contact me? If you are a bot you can email me at doctorevil@pitofhell.com. Humans might try neoa, and then some numbers 20634, the standard at sign, then gmail, a dot and finally com.