With considerable poetic powers, this writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being. I should think it a sincere confession, though of a most unloveable state. John Stuart Mill's annotation on his copy of Browning's 'Pauline'

Was it something said, Something done, Vexed him? was it touch of hand, Turn of head? Strange that very way Love begun I as little understand Love's decay. Robert Browning, from 'In a Year'

Ugh, when did Penguin Classics adopt these matte, rubbery POD covers? Maybe only with online purchases?

Four Writers, One Johnson I should not have been surprised that Chesterton was not to be found in Samuel Beckett's library. Perhaps I expected to find a trenchant remark. Chesterton belonged to an entirely different literary constellation; there was not even an interesting friction as sparked…

“I shall read a passage of Shakspeare every Sunday at ten o Clock—you read one at the same time and we shall be as near each other as blind bodies can be in the same room.” — John Keats in a letter (1818)

It's extraordinary how a period like the 1990s can suddenly become unintelligible; too close for the clarity of real distance, too far for lived familiarity.

Pluralism and the Modern Poet www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Exciting news for Anita Brookner fans! #BookSky 💙📚 Hermione Lee’s biography, ANITA BROOKNER: ART & LIFE, is due to be published on 10th September 2026. Details here: www.penguin.co.uk/books/445930...

Happy birthday in heaven to Georges Simenon, born on this day in 1903. To mark the occasion, a piece l did a few years ago for @crimereads.bsky.social celebrating the dark, transgressive wonder that is his Roman’s durs. crimereads.com/simenon-roma...

The Page Sixty-One Test When I don't know a writer, when the name means nothing, when I have no recommendation to go on, when the book is simply there in a shop making its case with a cover and a spine, I open it to page 61. Not page one, where every writer is on their best behaviour; and not the…

Existence is the deepest fact we can think of | And it is such a nice fact. — G. K. Chesterton

The Force of Gravity

“The view from the Milky Way back down to the bleak and blackened ruins of the earth spinning in space could not appear more strange, and yet the childhood we spent on it […] seems scarcely more distant than the day before last.” — W. G. Sebald, A Place in the Country

The Bewildered Ape Reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy (1908) after C. S. Lewis's The Reading Life is like stepping from a warm room into colder air. Where Lewis invites, Chesterton confronts. Both are Christians writing about the insufficiency of materialism, but where Lewis gently suggests you might…

When I’m next asked my date of birth . . .

The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously. G. K. Chesterton, ‘Orthodoxy’ (1908)

It is much easier to write a good Times leading article than a good joke in Punch. For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity. G. K. Chesterton, ‘Orthodoxy’

Stemmed This blog began with Sartre, with a quotation about the collaboration between writer and reader, pasted into a blank page in January 2009. Reading literature is a collaboration in which the writer exerts a measure of control over interpretation, but that control is never complete. I didn't…

Essayistic Grace I have read (and reread) eleven of Pascal Quignard's books on my shelves and have written about him for fourteen years on this blog, probably more often than I've written about any writer except Beckett and Woolf. Yet, once read, I never retain him: no favourite passages that keep…

Reading Chesterton's 'Orthodoxy'. The suicide of thought he describes has accelerated in ways he couldn't have imagined.Nobody argues about what's true, only what's effective. Small tight systems of thought that explain everything and notice nothing.

www.theguardian.com/artanddesign... Having been obsessed with Gwen since my first visit to #amgueddfacymru aged 13 I’ve been waiting for this for years See you there on Saturday 💚

"Young men write to me and ask me to recommend a course of reading. Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for books read all of them. There is no other course." Andrew Lang, ‘Adventures Among Books’

“No man ever will unfold the capacities of his own intellect who does not at least chequer his life with solitude.” — Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis

“I intend to keep nattering on about books, authors and our imperiled literary culture.” Ron Charles on being laid off as book critic at the Washington Post. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Pierre Joris extolled Giordano Bruno’s mind for how Bruno “saw through” the dominant myths of his day, including the one that placed Earth at the center of the cosmos. In Joris' words:

Roger Ebert, shortly before his death, “I sometimes think that we have seen a great civilisation destroyed in our lifetimes.”

John Carey’s Useful Vandalism I instinctively recoil from the central argument of John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? though I’m not sure I should. His position is deliberately deflationary. Art is whatever anyone says it is. There is no objective standard of taste. Kant and Hegel were…

Saturday but it feels like Sunday. Erik Satie said his “Medusa” was his most autobiographical work. 🙃 Cheers to that, says my coffee.

Alice Oswald in the key of k.

Hardy's God Who Cannot Explain Himself: timesflowstemmed.com/2026/01/31/h...

Mistaking syntax for vocabulary.

"Dying as of self-laughter; whereat I / Would raise my voice in song.”

The De Quincey-Effect: timesflowstemmed.com/2026/01/30/t...

Writers who believed language could hold genuine complexity without reducing it to surface cleverness: feeling a pull towards Henry James‘s ‘The Golden Bowl’. The De Quincey-effect. Thomas Hardy shows you how much emotional weight a short poem can bear when every word is exactly right.

O, know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument; So all my best is dressing old words new, Spending again what is already spent: For as the sun is daily new and old, So is my love still telling what is told. - Shakespeare sonnet 76

In case any poets needed some Dan Beachy-Quick tonight... "When the eye loses the ability to see an object for the fact of its very nearness, then the imagination must alter the lens. A poem may bring us what we see in it just such a way."

—"The Earth, sayest thou? The Human race? By Me created? Sad its lot? Nay: I have no remembrance of such place: Such world I fashioned not.'— Thomas Hardy, ‘God-Forgotten’

It is publication today for Late Heaney I am told, although I imagine it’ll be a while before I see it between ice storms and the broad Atlantic. I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it, as it’s a different kind of book for me in form and style. global.oup.com/academic/pro...

Back to commuting and it dawns on me that within, what, ten years, reading serious literature will be like playing the harpsichord: a minority pursuit, respected by some, incomprehensible to most. Or worse, archaic, like Latin or handwritten letters.

Your eyes on me were as eyes that rove Over tedious riddles of years ago; And some words played between us to and fro On which lost the more by our love. The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing Alive enough to have the strength to die Thomas Hardy, ‘Neutral Tones’

"dark night -- the first snowflakes hit my neck" Issa Kobayashi (image: Shotei Takahashi)

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew, And I was unaware. Thomas Hardy, ‘The Darkling Thrush’

'Milton is credited with coining more new words even than Shakespeare (630 to Shakespeare's 229), and "freaked" is one of them, denoting the untidy-looking black blotch on a pansy's petals.' John Carey, 'A Little History of Poetry'

@publisherswkly.bsky.social You refer to Judith Hermann's novel as a "deeply affecting English-language debut". This will be news to those who read translations of 'Alice' 15 years ago, not to speak of 'Summerhouse, Later', and 'Letti Park'. www.publishersweekly.com/9780374619510

Whenas in silks my Julia goes, Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows The liquefaction of her clothes. Robert Herrick Wonderful ‘liquefaction’.

So good luck came, and on my roof did light Like noiseless snow, or as the dew of night: Not all at once, but gently, as the trees Are, by the sunbeams, tickled by degrees. —Robert Herrick, 'The Coming of Good Luck'

I may have traveled too far into winter. —Solvej Balle, On the Calculation of Volume

Night fell before I was able to set aside the day… I am sitting in the garden… I thought I was silent, but in reality, I presented my *inmost* self / to the night, / to the garden eased from the green of the day, / and to the animals lying all around. — Maria Gabriela Llansol (diaries)

Elizabeth Bowen hosts dinner for Iris Murdoch, inter alia, at Bowen’s Court.