Category: Learning
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Quarter Past Midnight: The Book Reading Sweetspot
Do you know what ‘stolen time’ is? It’s minutes or hours that you shouldn’t have, but manage to ‘half inch’ (pinch) or through a cancellation it ends up in your hands. In its unexpected nature, stolen time is rich in potential. And it has boundaries, a start and a finish,…
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Did the Adventurers Land in Kinghorn or Pettycur?
Here’s a scenario: You have a question over a trivial event from history, say the mighty Eighteenth century. It niggles. So what can you do to get an answer? Quickest way is to 1. Search the internet (actually, most stuff from the world isn’t on the internet at all). You…
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A new Assembly or Allocation of Materials
In my two most recent posts (On the Hunt… and A Plaque for Burns…) I made the point that it’s fun and interesting to get out of the house and use a book as a guide to track down a place that’s relevant to your favourite historical period or person.…
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Book Facts Rather than Internet Facts?
Which do you trust more: Book facts or internet facts? When I began the Genius Fan blog my plan was to create illustrated stories based around: ‘James Boswell and his life and times in the Eighteenth century’. The objective was to reach like-minded fans of Boswell and the Eighteenth century.…
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Family and Friends Boswell Left Behind
It’s easy to lose sight of the family picture when you dig into the mountains of words, essays and books written about James Boswell. If you want to add another dimension as you read about his life, then take a moment to think about the others in his family and…
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Never Mind the History, They’re My Friends
In a previous post I mentioned the pleasure of ‘discovery’ when learning about a subject. It’s an interest-driven process unhindered by formality or academic structure (at least for me it is), and that’s one of the reasons it’s so enjoyable to learn through discovery. I’ve been learning about the 18th…
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‘Discovery’: The Best Way to Learn History
One of the many pleasures in learning about history and times past is ‘discovery’. By this I mean the process by which a person follows their interest and simply finds things out. I expect everyone has experienced that process. You can accumulate a great deal of knowledge on a subject…
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