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Withdrawn books, an occasional series.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.

Walked along the A96 to Bucksburn, an eccentric thing to do.

Stills from Andrei Rublev on the bus.

Is typing Martinů’s name without his diacritic (a kroužek) not a little like removing the bubbles before handing someone a glass of champagne.

Though this review is behind a paywall, clicking the arrow triggers one of the strangest Irish accents I have ever heard, with its talk of 'ballaRd' (like the novelist), 'stanzaR', and 'Thomas KinsellaR'. Could audio AI have infiltrated the paper of record?

An annotation on the nearest Krasznahorkai novel here in my office.

Jessica and I reacquaint ourselves with Lady Gregory’s A Woman’s Sonnets,born of her love affair with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.

An early review of The Poems of Seamus Heaney. I wonder if other reviews will say which phases/bits of Heaney they feel are his best, and where the real core of the achievement lies? We shall see. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

I find myself teaching Mangan from an edition I produced ‘twenty golden years ago’. I love this lesser-known poem of his on coffee-drinking -

Perhaps the single best academic study of nineteenth-century Irish poetry.

Dafydd ap Gwilym and the poetry of the penis (tr. Matthew Francis).

Is this Giotto painting as 'you-want-a-piece-of-this-then'-y as Jesus ever gets in Renaissance art, I wonder.

There was a war Peloponnesian that bled the Greeks dry like a lesion, whose triremes and hoplites encountered no stop lights, but warred on all through killing ‘seision’.

‘My first mention on legacy.com /automatically made Tony Anthony!’ Some grim humour here as afterlife imitates art for Tony Harrison.

An uncollected TLS poem of Paul Muldoon's from 1984 comparing his fellow Northern Irish poets to types of cheese.

A shaggy ink-cap at Bennachie.

RIP Tony Harrison, my doughty early guide to life in the North of England. Leeds United currently two one up against Bournemouth.