Lucky Bag Apologies, this month you are getting a very mixed bag of trivial and introspective stuff. I feel it’s a bit irresponsible of me, when the world is going to hell in a handbasket: Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and so on. However, I don’t really know how to write the serious material, even if I wanted to. But I just want to say that I am as appalled as anyone else at the horrors going on in the world. Words that you always have to look up Are you like me, there are some words whose meaning you have to look up every time you encounter them? You meet this word in a book or article you’re reading, you look it up and think, ‘Oh, that’s what it means. Now I know.’ Then a couple of months later, you come across it again, and you’ve already forgotten the meaning. Orwell made this point not about meaning but about spelling: he observed that he could never spell the formal name for a snapdragon, antirrhinum, without looking it up in a dictionary. My brother John once told me of an art crit...