And I thought American papers were famous for fact-checking! Robert Pinsky in the New York Times.

Charlotte Brontë did not send out manuscripts for consideration, I learn, she ‘perseveringly obtruded’ them.

A copy of Eumenides belonging to Alexander Charles Quentin Hamilton Irvine, then a student in Winchester College.

Aberdeen from above.

An unusual fact about Planxty is that Andy Irvine (second left) appeared in 1957 as a child actor in Magpies, an ITV adaptation of Henry James's short story 'The Pupil'.

Towards winter.

In Rosmuc once, Patrick Pearse asked if people had heard of the early 19th century poet Colm de Bhailís. Colm the poet! he lives next door, came the answer (as Gaeilge). Colm de Bhailís (1796-1906), Ireland’s only supercentenarian poet (?).

A rather painful review of Stefan Collini's Literature and Learning by Daniel Karlin, who is not sure that anyone cares anymore about Arnold, Leavis, Empson and Eagleton and those other old Easter Island statues. www.the-tls.com/literature/l...

Roy Foster pronounces on The Poems of Seamus Heaney. www.the-tls.com/literature/p...

Are we to infer from this poem that Tom Paulin has belatedly made his peace with Philip Larkin?

There is a poem in the new Tom Paulin book about a Cézanne portrait of someone called Alexandre Paulin. I wonder which painting he means? The best I can do is The Card Players, whose models were apparently called Le père Alexandre and Paulin Paulet.

My word St Christopher, what a large tooth you have.

An apparition of St Martin to the anthroposophists of Deeside prior to a lantern walk in his honour.

Only catching up with this now: Jeremy Noel-Tod on The Poems of Seamus Heaney. literaryreview.co.uk/the-pen-the-...

Filling in a page on my workplace's research database today, I found myself obliged to select the function marked 'create external person'.

George Moore thought this 'the most perfect prose narrative in English letters.'

Delighted to read in a description of the 'Rhynie chert', a famous Devonian archaeological sample from upper Donside, that it contains 'the oldest known sex-organs in world history'.

Corse Castle and environs, near Tarland.

Psychopharmacology and Sexual Disorders by David Wheatley. Signed copies available on request.

I see the world is full of one-star reviews of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley. Canonical authors' most-maligned books (Shirley, Barnaby Rudge, Romola, St Ronan's Well, The Virginians...): would make a promising subject for an essay collection.

More facial profiling in Charlotte Brontë, as an Irish curate in Shirley wears the appearance not just of a Native American but a Native American who owns a slave plantation, of all things.

Stoat Poetry, a new magazine edited by Ingrid Leonard. www.stoatmagazine.co.uk/about

Does anyone, I wonder, still agree with Donald Davie's negative judgement on The Dry Salvages as 'quite simply a bad poem', 'a case of sheer incompetence'? academic.oup.com/eic/article-...

A mouse young Morven made for a friend whose birthday it was yesterday. Like the ancient Gauls gathering to attack Caesar, it occurred to me, the partygoers descended on the festivities ex tribus partibus.

Withdrawn books, an occasional series.

Very sorry to hear Hull poet Maurice Rutherford (b. 1922) has died at a great age.

Amusing to see the classicists at the Daily Mail, firing the latest salvoes in their gender wars, numbering Germaine Greer among Newnham College’s famous ‘alumni’. (One might modestly propose unfamiliarity with the declensions of ‘alumnus’ as good grounds for revoking a degree, if they have one.)

What is Webern’s Symphony at Aberdeen music hall if not my last night of the proms. Hoping therefore to sing along tunelessly to its reversible tone-row.

A first review of Tom Paulin's Namanlagh, inter alia. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

John Banville pays tribute to Derek Mahon (£). www.irishtimes.com/culture/book...

I am distraught at the death of our dear and wonderful colleague Andrew Gordon. A terrible loss.

If my life subdivided into Beethoven opus numbers, what number am I currently at, I ask myself, sitting down to play this.

Amid his spirited phrenological diagnoses of imbecility, viciousness and degeneracy in Belgian schoolgirls, Crimsworth in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor takes a moment to tell us one girl ‘had precisely the same shape of skull as Pope Alexander the Sixth’.

From my homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay, born on this day a hundred years ago.

Amusing when your daughter finds a rabbit skeleton and a while later your wife asks ‘Do you have Morven’s skull or do I?’ Plus, an unexpected forest fire across the glen.

Majestic Kildrummy, home of the Earl of Mar, ill-fated fomenter of the 1715 Rising.

Full marks for persistence to Ferdia the cat who, barred from the house with his dead bird, has elected to post its head though the cat flap.

The space of a door.

A welcome new and expanded Collected Didsbury in time for that poet's eightieth birthday next Spring. www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/...

Like Prince Andrew, Yertle was an unpopular lord who had a fall and lost all his turtles.

As chance would have it, I find myself teaching this today. Hard to imagine an angrier poem, yet even ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ pivots to a reconciliatory tone, in the end.

FEMININE SEXUALITY, writes SJ Horrocks of Cambridge, helpfully.

Does relishing the opening of this novel place me at elevated risk of a rather large reading commitment, I ask myself.

I enjoyed the withering timeslip anacolutha of this poem of Isabelle Baafi’s.

Looking for hidden figures in the cabinet room, in Provost Skene’s house.

Presumed last moth of the year.

Figures on the ceiling, Muses’ Room, Crathes Castle.

Gorge-ous Corrieshalloch, with Beckett connection (John Calder snr).

Splanc gheal faoi éadan an chnoic ar an Abhainn Dubh í léim an bhradáin.

I thought this John Berryman poem, exhumed from an archive by Shane Macrae and published in the TLS, was very fine.