Delighted to learn that the title of volume ten of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time derives from a scene where the rackety littérateur Lindsay Bagshaw wants to check a quotation in Palgrave's Golden Treasury, pulls a bookshelf down on top of himself, and says 'Books do furnish a room'.

A painting produced in youth (c. age 10).

A short essay of mine on Cavafy. brandnewcarnation.substack.com/p/dont-hope-...

A good pub quiz question would be, what masterpiece of modern Irish writing was bankrolled by a British high-street department store. The answer is Stephen MacKenna’s remarkable translation of the Enneads, sponsored by Sir Ernest Debenham.

Listing on the Suhrkamp website says this is finally coming out this summer. 1348 pages too, no less. www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/...

‘When he addressed me as Mee-haul, I went weak’, writes Michael Hofmann in an elegy for Michael Longley here.

‘Some of these things are only extravagant, others approach insanity’, wrote a critic of a Michael Field book, which, in a piece of vengeful proto-quote-tweeting, they then used on the cover of their next volume. I will note in passing that none of Michael Field’s books appears to be in print?

Joyous ache of living, still occasionally to be felt.

What ever became of that droning Irishman in London, I wonder, who tells Janet Frame to give up writing (‘not savoury’) and get a job in a biscuit factory.

I wonder if anyone might be in the market for a short essay on Beckett’s The Unnamable as a latter-day Gnostic gospel. substack.com/home/post/p-...

Some middle-aged wisdom on going around the place pretending to be yourself from Tom Paulin.

Am I alone in thinking there is a revealing family resemblance - those rotating chromatic triplets - between these two fugues in D minor, one by JS Bach, the other by his son Wilhelm Friedmann?

An amusing classroom prank would be to introduce a discussion of poetry and AI by reading this poem by AI.

Hollow laughs aplenty in these dispatches from University of Bollockshire-land by Stefan Collini, whom I take to be my spiritual leader in the field, or should I say ‘sector’. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This morning I enjoyed adding this Wilhelm Friedmann Bach polonaise to my repertoire for any putative future village-hall recital.

RIP Sonny Rollins. Here in his honour is Kamau Brathwaite’s ‘Jah’.

Stained glass at Monymusk Kirk (11th c.), where Gavin Douglas was minister in the 1490s. Other local landmarks of note include Bennachie and Monymusk House.

There is a lot of poetry in Janet Frame’s memoirs, and here she is in An Angel at My Table (1984) quoting the still pre-rediscovery Lynette Roberts.

Experiencing some concern for The state of Janet Frame’s hearing as I learn here that her father often ‘played her to sleep’ with the soothing tones of his bagpipes.

Anthony Powell-pronounced-Pole once turned away a tradesman who asked for Mr Powell-rhymes-with-foul. ‘No one of that name here’, he told him, and shut the door.

Reviewing a twelve-volume epic poem about Francis Drake by Alfred Noyes, Edward Thomas pronounces it ‘utterly irresponsible foam upon the surface of the present moment.’

Déjeuner sur l’herbe.

Admittedly it is hard to commend the work of the sons of Bach without sounding like Alan Partridge saying ‘Only the band The Beatles could have been’ about Wings, but this polonaise by Wilhelm Friedmann Bach is quite sublime. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dxpi...

Is the Elizabethan heptameter, seen here in Chapman’s Homer, the electric guitar solo of English verse lines? You can take a teabreak in the middle of one and when you come back it’s still going.

I was much taken with John Eliot Gardiner's Music in The Castle of Heaven: A Portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach, and write about it here. brandnewcarnation.substack.com/p/the-habit-...

Mindful as one is of the condemnation of gnosticism at the Council of Antioch, what credence is to be given to the story of the evangelist and the bedbugs in the apocryphal Acts of John?

Among other thoughts occurring on Guardian novel list, I notice comic fiction doesn’t seem to rate highly for the selectors. Hence no: Beckett Twain Waugh Sarraute Bainbridge Edgeworth Bellow Hrabal Flann O’Brien Pynchon Smollett (only 1 18th c. novel on list) John Kennedy Toole

Not exactly your standard National Trust tearoom wall decoration: John Duncan’s Ivory, Apes and Peacocks at Pitmedden House, near Ellon.

News that stays news from Seamus Heaney as Celtic win the league.

Among the student devotees of JH Prynne in 1970s Cambridge was, mirabile dictu, future High Tory grandee Charles Moore.

A tall young man at my front door just handed me this, and when I described it to my family as a ‘200 pound book’ and someone said, How vulgar to talk about its price like that!,* I hastened to clarify that I meant its weight.

Traitors! RS Thomas complains about Welsh birds nesting in England.

This handsome essay collection on Michael Longley now out from Wake Forest UP.

David Wheatley (@nemoloris.bsky.social) on the contemporary Scottish poets Kathleen Jamie and Peter Davidson

A palaeographical puzzler from Ruskin’s Praeterita, a book which features as its frontispiece some portraits of his aunts.

A hint of things to come in this Russian-themed poem from Carol Rumens’ debut collection, A Strange Girl in Bright Colours.

‘It is hard to imagine a combination with more possibilities for wretchedness than that of poet and agricultural labourer’, observes Edward Thomas (momentarily forgetting the plight of the Edwardian hack reviewer?).

'He encouraged nobody to do postgraduate study.' Mr Prynne as tutor. catherinebrown.org/mr-prynne-at...

There has yet to be an Oxford Book of Exes, but this Carol Rumens poem would do well in any such volume.

Discussing Bach’s cantatas, John Eliot Gardiner suddenly diverts into a discussion of ‘vertical’ versus ‘horizontal’ wine and whisky tasting. Unexpected.

What a pleasure to find myself holding forth on Scottish poetry in the new issue of the New York Review of Books. Many thanks to Jana Prikryl and the Review for extending me the hospitality of their pages. www.nybooks.com/articles/202...

Glad to learn of Prynne’s short-lived (1957) Martian phase.

Carol Rumens channelling Montale by the shores of the river Hull.

Winding stair.

Something I like in Stewart Sanderson’s poetry is its shall we say eighteenth-century quality.

In 1705 Bach insulted a bassoonist (‘Zippelfagottist’), was punched for his trouble, and responded by drawing his sword and tearing the lining of his antagonist’s coat. Gott in Himmel!

Will Fleming on Prynne as a 'theorist of light, a sun poet'. thelondonmagazine.org/essay-the-pr...

As a child, she says, my wife would watch Royal Variety shows and see a pianist who was always introduced with ‘If music be the food of love, let’s cut straight to the entrée! And here to help us do just that’s Bob Fontray’. Bob Fontray though – real or hallucination?

A portrait of the Old Pretender James VIII/III at the top of a staircase by the ‘murder room’ in Fyvie Castle.