Ben Schott
Ben Schott
Ben Schottis a British writer, photographer, and author of the Schott's Miscellanies and Schott's Almanac series...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth26 May 1974
deal good great viewed
A great deal of American T.V. viewed on Hulu, which is superb - '30 Rock', for instance, is on very good form.
fluidity
I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.
access fast filter government immediate sites trip web
The web can be a fast trip to the library, giving you immediate access to a government report, or it can filter media for you, which is why I look at around 15- 20 of these sites every day.
amazing
For me, writing is like being taken on a walk by a footnote: It's amazing where you end up.
british
If I'm researching something strange and rococo, I'll go to the London Library or the British Library and look it up in books.
eater follow main martin paul street wall
I follow blogs, particularly all the main political ones - Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale, Coffee House, Paul Waugh, Iain Martin in the Wall Street Journal, and so on. And some American ones, like the Huffington Post, Gawker, Boing Boing; or Eater and Daily Candy, also American, which are about where to go to eat.
public
The radio's pretty much always on, and I also listen to some American podcasts, such as for 'National Public Radio' and 'Newsweek'.
alarm hardly luxury quite
I have the luxury of getting up quite late, so I hardly ever set an alarm clock.
job
I always wanted to be a photographer. While I was at school, I got a lab-monkey holiday job in the darkrooms at the 'Independent.' What they taught me there was: you need to get the whole story in one frame.
book buy fabric huge life looking love spend time
I spend a lot of time looking at rococo books. And almanacs used to be huge sellers - they were pretty much part of the fabric of life. I thought, this is bizarre, I'd love to buy a book like this, and there isn't one. So I thought, all right then, this could be fun. I'll write an almanac.
selling stopped
For me, photography only stopped because I was selling books.
belong city fond knew london map
I'm very fond of an old map of London that used to belong to my father. I'm a big London fan, and the evolution of the city is astonishing, when you look back to Pepys and how small it was - everyone knew each other.
bit second sort
The idea that I am cynical because I'm writing the books that I write is a bit like someone saying, 'What, you've done a second album? Oh, I see, cashing in on your first album, are you?' But I'm a musician! It's sort of what I do.
emotions fact greatest reinforced
Writing 'Schottenfreude' has reinforced the fact that there are few, if any, emotions that have not been experienced, and analyzed, by some of the world's greatest writers.