The idea of the Renaissance Computer will feature here over the next few months. Meanwhile in America and London…And happy birthday… Even if Will was not “A man of travel, that hath seen the world.”

In the electronic age with its vast databank of stored knowledge, when the mot juste is just a Wikiquote away and human memory of facts all but redundant, the idea of a commonplace book may seem quaint. Every blog, after all, is a sort of commonplace book, with items culled from elsewhere, reassembled, and subjected to vigorous commentary along the way.

One man who has seen much of the world and Kabul writes nicely about the Commonplace Book – the Wiki of Shakespeare’s day, as Neil Rhodes suggests in many of his books, see quote above.