Reading Jonathan Meades on Vanburgh. 'Fours years in the Bastille gave him an enduring...' what could it be? '... taste for French architecture.'

I just typed (and sent) the words: 'Are you still using this email address? Please let me know if you're not.'

Andrew Marvell and his legacy.

I wonder how receptive Alastair MacMhaighstir Alastair (18th c.) would have been to PG Wodehouse’s wisecrack about distinguishing between a ray of sunshine and a Scotsman with a grievance.

‘Tout simple l’image au centre.’ Robert Pinget, L’apocryphe.

Raphael in Haddo House.

Standing in the snowy Cairngorms reading a novel about the Phoenician desert while my associates enjoy some winter sports.

When I explained the concept of a mortgage to my son, he suggested we sell our house for half its value and buy it back from ourselves, thus ensuring that our mortgage future payments would be half of what they are now.

Truth.

Heaney and Hughes as rugby (recte rugby and Gaelic football?) goalposts in the cultural landscape.

Roy Fisher on the poet’s message. A useful aide-mémoire, I find.

Vulcan Street, Leeds, 1975, by Peter Mitchell, one of the great 20th century photographers (he had various jobs including lorry driving while taking pictures). The man is Eric Massheder.

Boldog születésnapot és gratulálok, happy birthday and congratulations to György Kurtág, who turns one hundred today. His new opera premieres tomorrow. Here he is playing some Bach with Márta Kurtag. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8lT...

The day after György Kurtág’s hundredth birthday, his new opera premieres in Budapest. I notice it’s on the same theme as this Gert Hofmann novel. Maybe a tie-in reprint is in order, @cbeditions.bsky.social?

What a joy to hear Tamara Stefanovich play some György Kurtág in the studio on Petroc Trelawny’s Sounds, ahead of the great Hungarian’s hundredth birthday tomorrow. www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...

So what’s your point here exactly French-language Shakespeare.

I was just discussing the use of classical quantitative metres in English (as one does), and described this phenomenon as 'obsolutely absolete'.

Serving on the governing board of my workplace in the eighteenth century were, apparently, death, the pope and a highland rebel. From Davidson and Stevenson’s The Lost City: Old Aberdeen.

In his poem on Lord Hastings dying of smallpox, Dryden describes the smallpox pimples weeping over how sad it is that Lord Hastings is dying of smallpox. Deep.

Piano practice for my hypothetical village hall recital.

This old cutting fluttered from a book. My grandfather remembering Wicklow in the 1920s.

From Simon Armitage’s Short and Sweet.

A good way to pique John Donne's interest was to describe this holiday island in sentences beginning 'Norman is an island...'

A round of applause from my students for Ciaran Carson today when one of their number very dramatically read out an eight-page poem from this book.

One of a pair of identical twins dies. Meeting his brother the Reverend Spooner of Oxford asks, ‘Was it you or your brother who died?’

Rider Haggard + circumflex accents + imperfect subjunctive tense = Salammbô?

Cactus struggles to make friends.

Would it be uncharitable to describe Byatt’s Frederica quartet as containing four novels in the same way a piano quartet contains four pianos? There is a sharp law of diminishing returns after volume one, I find…

In the 1830s a Cornish agitator named John Tom assumed the name Sir William Courtenay as part of a mad millenarian uprising. This writer has chosen to call him Tom/Courtenay, which has given me strange visions of the Hull actor of that name fomenting the Cornish peasantry.

Deeside doorways.

(Irish accent required.) I went to the alphabet shop hoping to buy a job lot as a gift, but they were really overpriced. It was a terrible ordeal.

A dramatic letter from Frank and Anita Kermode’s Oxford Book of Letters. But what did Horace say in reply?

‘without that no lamp burns in the tower, no dancer spins.’ When did academics stop writing like this, I wonder. God bless Frank Kermode!

Paradise exists, says Denis Donoghue, but only in fragments such as ‘excellent sausage, the smell of mint, and Ladro the night cat’. PS Yeats was not a symbolist.

How do you buy a church on your phone? On the apse store.

Alberto Morocco’s Boys at a Bathing Place, from the Gray’s Academy show at Aberdeen Art Gallery.

I am Dirt Rich-richer for the receipt of this in the post.

Google (not chatgpt) has a 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote' moment. Shocking.

A’ sgithidh air Bheinn a’ Chruinnich. Winter pursuits going strong here.

Margery Kempe bitterly regretted not marrying Fungus the bogeyman while she had the chance.

Dreaming of Aran, Andrew McNeillie is ‘not at home’.

The inhabitants of the young Hartley Coleridge’s imaginary land, Ejuxria, were angry, but then again I suppose the Brontë’s imaginary land was Angria.

Among my own stranger publications, and I've still no real idea what was going on here, was an appearance in the International Journal of Epidemiology. academic.oup.com/ije/article-...

In 1972, to his considerable surprise, George Oppen was contacted by Playboy magazine for comment on the poems of Mao Zedong.

William Dunbar fashions a well-wrought ‘ern’.

Helen Vendler’s passion for poetry criticism was born of an embarrassed inability to tell her parents she no longer believed in the resurrection or the virgin birth.

‘The Poems of Seamus Heaney entombs him as the poet of a fading liberal order.’ A review in Poetry (Chicago), the rather vengeful subtitle I’ve just quoted coming from a sub-editor rather than the review itself. www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/176...

What would it take for Robert Lowell to find Ted Hughes ‘Parisian’? Meeting Tony Harrison.

It seems we owe our ability to read The Book of Margery Kempe to a trampled ping pong ball at an English country house party.

Among the stranger things to have happened in the afterlife of Robert Burns was John Clare’s believing, in his madness, that he was Burns. Yet give it a few hours and the land will be positively coming down with people who believe the same thing…