This week’s news that the first exo-moon might have been found, about 4000 light years away, is startling for several reasons. The first astonishing bit is that it was found at all. The majority of planets orbiting other stars have been found by light-curve analysis as the planet passes directly between the parent star and … More An exo-moon that’s as big as Uranus! But it ain’t Endor
This year a whole series of my older print books have been brought back into print as second editions. They’ve come with new covers – strongly branded, themed, and to my mind highly evocative of the subject matter. I featured the first of them a couple of weeks back. Here’s another. I wrote it way … More This week’s feature book cover – Blue Water Kiwis
This week’s obscure English word is turbary. This word means the legal right to cut turf or peat from ground belonging to somebody else. It was important, upon a time, because peat was a specific and limited resource in certain regions; but who’d have ever imagined that the rights to cut it actually had its … More The obscure word of the week is turbary
One of the main features of New Zealand’s society, last century, was its ‘cultural cringe’. It was a classic inferiority complex; the idea that, on the one hand, we were punching above our weight and beating the world; yet on the other, that we would always somehow never be good enough. My own work has … More Reconciling the battle for Crete
On 1 January 2019 the New Horizons probe – the one that whipped past Pluto in 2015 – will encounter another outer solar-system body: 2014 MU69. Informally it’s become known as Ultima Thule. The neat part is that this body wasn’t even known when New Horizons was launched in January 2006. Back then, the probe … More New Horizons and Ultima Thule – the bonus mission
After some adventures in which, it seemed, couriers couldn’t deliver anything to my post office box, the advance print copies of my second-edition military histories finally arrived this week. Four of my earlier military histories are being re-released as new and revised editions in the run-up to Christmas: Battle for Crete, Desert Duel, Italian Odyssey … More This week’s feature book covers
This week’s obscure English word is variorum. It means an edition of an author’s work, with notes by a variety of editors, and often with variations on the main text. Your challenge? Write a sentence (or two) in the comments using this word. Copyright © Matthew Wright 2018
