‘Did the plan fail, Edward?’ ‘Yes Tubbs.’

The Hapsburg brotherhood of nations, as per Chojnicki in The Radetzky March.

‘Your excellency, it’s Austria-Hungary in the World Cup!’ ‘That’s good, who are we playing?’

A painting from my youth (late 70s/early 80s).

At the National Gallery.

A copy of Androcles and the Lion in the Shaw alphabet. Doesn’t seem to have caught on.

A frankly incredible claim in Edgeworth’s The Absentee that ortolans can be found on the Blasket Islands. Ní dóigh liom go bhfuil an focal sin ag an Athair Ó Laoghaire, as Flann O’Brien would say.

‘Ah, this is surely the lake of the Arabian tale, where the enchanted fish were, of the situation of which it appeared so incredible to the Sultan and his Vizier that they should be ignorant, it being but a short distance from the capital’ (Walter Scott on his visit to Lough Bray).

Walter Scott to Maria Edgeworth in 1825 on his adventures in Co. Wicklow and local perceptions of the tribe of poets.

A poem from Dennis O’Driscoll, born OTD in 1954. Dennis once told me he would have liked to track down all remaining copies of his first book and bury them in a landfill.

Janet Mullarney, Panorama, Devil’s Glen, Wicklow.

Shameless public indecency at this Aberdeen car park.

Outstanding jasper standing stone and other egregious protuberances at Easter Aquorthies.

Shaggy, bumbling, tweedy elder… gets book on Tennyson for Christmas.

Poetry readings often went ahead in seventh-century Ireland without even the most basic form of risk assessment, sometimes with tragic consequences.

A small elegy by Dennis O’Driscoll, who died OTD in 2012.

My great-aunt Edie Wheatley of Newtownmountkennedy has sadly died at the great age of 100.

Fleeting glimpse of the elusive Deeside tree cat.

More Christmas playlists should be organised around the cosmic violence of Jésus accepte la souffrance, from Messiaen’s La nativité du seigneur, let me suggest. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMsa...

A copy of Edgeworth’s Tales of Fashionable Life travelled from Waterloo to Salamanca and Burgos, losing one owner on the battlefield along the way.

The disappointments of reading. Underline, underline, thought the previous owner of my Washington Square.

Christmas jigsaws.

I asked my daughter what these were and she said, her rabbit toy’s ’criminal aliases’.

‘poetry zings on the lolling tongue’. Very sorry to hear that Chris Wallace-Crabbe has died. An endlessly urbane and affable bard.

No parking at all at all.

Apparition inouïe de Pierre Reverdy ici au nord de l’Écosse.

Close reading as critical proctology (Denis Donoghue on Henry James).

The ever-twinkly-eyed Jessica the cat.

John Carey, for long years Eng Lit’s man on the Clapham omnibus, has died.

‘She sometimes talked and constantly thought of good times gone by, though she had but the faintest idea of what those good things had been.’

Lure of the lost path. Rhynie, Clashindarroch and environs.

Ciaran Carson looks himself up but struggles to recognise the person he finds.

‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’ revisited territory for Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin in this recent poem from her New Selected.

‘Ae weet forenicht í’ the yow-trummle…’ Watergaw over Bennachie.

‘A voice like that should be notated… orchestrated’, muses Jack Dee of a panellist on I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. ‘I strongly incline towards the latter.’

Unwritten Morrissey songs secreted in Henry James novels, an occasional series.

'Chateaubriand says that the pleasures of youth revisited in memory are ruins seen by torchlight. I don’t know whether I’m the ruin or the torch.' Charming old essay on the Mémoires d’outre-tombe. 'Only style survives.' www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/01...

From the Telegraph obituary for the Peterhouse mathematician Hallard Croft, who was ‘never married’.

Some Larkinian prescience from 1969 (the first half of this passage, anyway).

So nearly an 1890s reference in this uncollected late Heaney poem!

Denise Riley's Say Something Back is one of the most admired poetry books of recent years. Attempting to assign it for an upcoming course of mine, however, I learn it is out of print. If *this* can't stay in print, what hope is there for other contemporary slim vols, I ask myself.

Mishearing the words 'the big Heaney book', my wife formed the impression that the large tome I was studying was something called 'the bikini book'.

Mallarmé boating on the Seine.

And now over to Catrìona Nic Gilleain to summarise my Celtic Encounters course.

A rarely-seen example of the weight-based biographical note.

Reading on the importance of the hyphen, I encounter the phrase 'first hand job experience'.

An early listing for Eric Falci's Cambridge History of Irish Poetry, available next year. www.cambridge.org/core/books/c...

Not something you expect to see in a Victorian novel, but a character in Trollope’s Barchester Towers claims to be related to Dr Slop from Tristram Shandy.

Can I be alone in detecting in the ‘we are, we /are’ repetition in this Prynne poem an echo of ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’?

Read my louche sex poem and much more besides in the new Little Review.