Why would we want to learn from our pasts, or ponder the power of the written and spoken word, or explore the deep questions of humanity? According to the University of Hertfordshire, we wouldn't. They've just cut all of our undergrad Humanities programmes

This is such a beautiful film: such delicacy, such magic.

Happy May Day

Ian Penman on the Beach Boys, LRB you are spoiling me: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

I wrote about what it's like to read the poetry of J.H. Prynne

When I was a little boy some adult asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up and I said "read poetry all day" and they said "that's not a job" and I said "I know, I'll think of something" but then I thought that maybe it could be a job and now that is my job and I couldn't be happier.

#TheCompleteBritten #78 Our Hunting Fathers, Op. 8 (1936) - symphonic cycle for high voice and orchestra Prologue (W.H. Auden) 1 Rats away! (anon) 2 Messalina (anon) 3 Dance of death (Thomas Ravenscroft) Epilogue and funeral march (W.H. Auden) Britten's "real Op. 1" had a difficult birth. 🧵 /1

'Beside corn felt crake persistently at night locally for wide awake was ever their delight This is not “all crepuscular and iambic”, but I find it moving in its cubist feeling for the candle-lit history of English.' (read this reading!!)

Discovered in a second-hand copy of What Maisie Knew: “my knees!” #usedbooks

J. H. Prynne wrote a guide to reading works of literature for Cambridge students. This was the postscript:

rest well jh prynne, the / mere & lovely centre, of the earth

Won’t you look at these colours.

I hit a wall with Musil (one for another day?), but Katalin Street floored me, a history of c20 Hungary that is also the history of a house & its ghosts. Its anger and grief and sorrow are just too much: like a story that doesn’t know how to tell itself, can only watch itself playing out. Loved it.

This has lifted me out of a reading slump: Enard, Tell them of Battles, trans. @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social, a beautiful short novel imagining Michelangelo in Constantinople in 1506. A fragmentary book about fragments, drafts, desires, acts of creative imagination, the thrill of translation.

There I stayed, and there forgot, my cheek laid on my Beloved fair. And all things ceased, and I was lost and all my worldly doubt and care were sunk among the lilies there. ‘Dark Night’, a poem by John of the Cross, translated by Martha Sprackland. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

‘Davis’s skill is to notice the way feeling snags on the various contingencies which by their indifference to its clamour make it visible to itself: a cane, a rug, a furnace, a caterpillar, an old shirt, a plate of chilli.’ David Trotter on why Lydia Davis writes. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

This film is a banger and well worth seeing on a big screen if you get the chance.

‘My own personal choice is to continue writing – simply because that is the only thing I can do to counterbalance the distortion. Someone has to use Russian as a language of love’ - Maria Stepanova on Disappearing Act @fitzcarraldoeds.bsky.social shop.pushkinhouse.org/blogs/booksh...

Missed The Secret Agent tonight, so here’s another man on the run…

“In the summer of 2023 the grass carried on growing as if nothing at all was wrong.” Maria Stepanova, The Disappearing Act, trans. @sashadugdale.bsky.social - I loved In Memory of Memory, and I’m loving this.

Flaubert, Three Tales (Trois Contes), trans. Roger Whitehouse. I feel like I should have / must have read this thirty years ago. Maybe I did: thank god for a bad memory. It hit me so hard: the last paragraph of A Simple Heart is so absurd, so devastating, so ecstatic., but all three left me reeling.

Any merit in the drivel I write comes from learning painstakingly how to write essays. To assay - to test - exactly what I thought and knew about a matter. Great essayists - Woolf, Orwell, Bacon, Montaigne, Hazlett - are utter intellectual joys as you read how they test themselves on topics too.

Cleo from 5 to 7: my first time seeing this on the big screen. Brilliant, astonishing, overwhelming; this film just has everything.

A lean reading month, at the end of which I trudged through this. Powell’s prose slips down well enough, but I just couldn’t find much to chew on. I really did want this to be a 2026 project; I imagine it all works cumulatively, but… is it worth persevering with?

Marty Supreme less so… I enjoyed all the elements, actually loved a lot of them, it’s all brilliantly done, but I couldn’t live with the whole. The ending felt cheap and the elation contrived; all tension but no excitement.

I really, really liked it.

This was great. I’d only read one Spark before (Girls of Slender Means), and that some time ago, so I had forgotten what to expect. A funny, hard-edged, playful bag of surprises.

The government’s suggestion that rolling out 20 minute courses on writing “AI“ prompts, sponsored by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, is somehow comparable to the founding of the Open University (the Wilson government‘s, & Jennie Lee’s, proudest achievement), is an insult to our human intelligence.

There is money for "education" if and only if that money is being directly funneled to corporations. Anything involving actual learning, however, well there's no magic money tree

The Seatonian Prize (awarded by Cambridge University for a poem on a sacred subject) celebrated its 275th birthday last year. An anniversary celebration (and readings by recent winners): Wednesday 28 January, 5pm, Little St Mary's Church, Cambridge. All welcome!

for reasons not totally clear to me, in the 60s, the annual chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee (the 2026 edition is going on right now!) was covered by Dutch press photographer who all went insanely hard on it

There’s such an unexpected synergy between these two brilliant little books - books about writing, its attachments and detachments, its discipline and its bother, but both also about death (Davis as much as Taylor), forgetting, ends and endings.

New books.

Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond: I've been slow to read this fantastic collection of stories, but am loving them. Something like Lydia Davis & Gaston Bachelard at the same time, if that's possible. Funny, astute, disorienting accounts of sensation, experience, & the line between loneliness & solitude.

It’s grotesque, erotic, horrific, angry, hallucinatory, sacred - a spiralling imagination, so tender in its intimacies and touches and memories - and so literary. Begins like a grimy Proust and gets more and more weird. I loved it!

Mircea Cartarescu, Blinding: The Left Wing, trans. Sean Cotter: this book was incredible, every bit as revelatory as Solenoid. Nothing about it makes easy sense: everything is luminous. A book of prophecy, horror, metaphysics, mythical urban geography, a generic and experiential compendium. Amazing!

#TheCompleteBritten #1 Oh That I Had Ne'er Been Married (1922) To mark 50 years since Benjamin Britten's death in 1976, in 2026 I'm listening to all Britten's music in the order he composed it. My journey starts with his first surviving song, written when he was just 9, a setting of Robert Burns.

Not going to lie, I’m finding this heavy going… So much about it that I want to like (a novel about psychoanalysis, about sickness, about a world that doesn’t quite know its own upheavals), but I can’t make those interesting things click into place… Have others had a better time with it?

❤️

Happy Christmas! If the reading year begins on 21 December, this is my first of 2026: Zeno’s Conscience, trans. William Weaver. Cigarettes and psychoanalysis.

Radical Times New Roman: “A font is not a transparency which you can entirely ignore as you read. It mediates the text, and the medium is, as we know, full of messages.”

I'm about three months late to this, but I read it today, and after a term of teaching students to care with their lives about reading, and writing (and feeling, and experiencing, and creating) it hit really hard. Every single line. anthonymoser.github.io/writing/ai/h...

The Twenty Days of Turin (‘A Report from the End of the Century’), trans. Ramon Glazov; it’s a ghost story, a political allegory, a prophecy. It’s barely a hundred pages, but I liked it a lot and it freaked me right out.

Ok, this was brilliant: an incredibly (impossibly) erudite study of European art and culture’s debt to the Middle East - but also feverish, woozy, romantic, forlorn. It’s almost too much (and too intense) to take in - but so affecting. I loved it.

“The elites are ecstatic about imagining a vast, uneducated, and unproductive population forced to pay companies like OpenAI to access the written word and to approximate thought.” Must read piece by Noah McCormack with too many quotaboe lines to select one! thebaffler.com/salvos/we-us...

And now this, my first Enard - Compass, trans. Charlotte Mandell @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social

Two crackers just finished. Oğuz Atay, Waiting for the Fear (trans. Ralph Hubbell), knotty stories of inertia, loss, absence, beautifully felt; Annie Ernaux, The Other Girl (trans. Alison L. Strayer), even by Ernaux’s standards this was stunning, a letter to the sister who died before she was born.

New on the blog today, I've written about ten excellent novellas I highly recommend. Featuring books by Anita Brookner, William Trevor. Muriel Spark and many more! #BookSky #Novellas #NovNov 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2025/10/30/t...

Ebert’s review looms large for me, not the least of which because he pinpointed a moment I found mesmerizing;