Jeremy Noel-Tod

The Laverock's Hoose Reading Hugh MacDiarmid on a cold, dark night

“Hugh MacDiarmid” wasn’t really called Hugh MacDiarmid, and his version of Scots wasn’t something anyone spoke — but he made mysterious modernist poetry out of old dictionaries. I wrote about his famous poem “The Watergaw”, and how one phrase in it seems to have been obscure even to the poet himself

The Laverock's Hoose Reading Hugh MacDiarmid on a cold, dark night

“Hugh MacDiarmid” wasn’t really called Hugh MacDiarmid, and his version of Scots wasn’t something anyone spoke — but he made mysterious modernist poetry out of old dictionaries. I wrote about his famous poem “The Watergaw”, and how one phrase in it seems to have been obscure even to the poet himself

Swings and roundabouts innit

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Suddenly, it’s Poetry Christmas

Wait, what? My son’s friend, traveling in China, is staying at a hotel chain called ‘James Joyce Coffetel’, and instead of a Gideon Bible, they leave a copy of Ulysses by the bedside.

Or ‘under’, as Virginia Woolf accidentally typeset it for the Hogarth Press edition…

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

Larkin was preoccupied with the thought that the modern university had a religious foundation: elsewhere, he likens his lecturer colleagues at Hull to nineteenth-century curates, an analogy that presumably also lay behind the title and third poem of 'Livings'

Sympathies — my recent experience has been that a situation like this diffuses like gas into everything, and the best, or at least sanest, thing really is to try and stay focused on the plans that suddenly it can seem the institution doesn’t really care about

“Don’t cite the Adversarial Poetry vs AI paper — it’s chatbot-made marketing ‘science’ – Pivot to AI”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/11/24/dont-cite-the-adversarial-poetry-vs-ai-paper-its-chatbot-made-marketing-science/

> They wrote a good headline, and then they faked the scientific process bit.

It's true! Here's Burgess doing 'The Burial of the Dead'. He had an extraordinary memory for poetry. We also have a tape of him reciting all of GM Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland. Someone who was there when it was recorded says he reeled it off from memory.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRfg...

That's a lot of radio comedy

“The Train” (1920) by Claughton Pellew (1890-1966) who I'm sure all my friends in Cornwall know well. I didn't know him well at all so here's a few notes for anyone as thick as me: www.bookroomartpress.co.uk/.../claughto... and trunchhistory.weebly.com/artists.html

Why is it dark at half past two. Yes, I'll hold

I miss the days when it was socially unacceptable to talk like a Nazi

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'.

The magic never grows old

Ah:

Marley had dreads, to begin with.

An actual genius, dedicated to the cause of writing great sentences for children of all ages. The Arabella and Mortimer books are like mad jazz: every sentence just going wherever the hell it fancies.

And yes, I've slogged through them at bedtimes, and they're boring and under-edited as hell. Why wasn't Joan Aiken a squillionaire

Those poorly written, unoriginal Harry Potter books are now truly taking us back to Enid Blyton Land

Dreamt about another elusive LP that only exists in the world of dreams. It was…

Stan Laurel & Sonny Liston - Jazz At Stonehenge (HMV, 1960)

The cover showed Stan and Sonny in hunting tweeds, looking at each other as if they were both prizefighters at a weigh-in, a megalith standing between them.

Publisher of geniuses, #LastBooks, has just introduced a 20% discount on all their books. Type ‘20%2025’ when you get to the cart below …

thelastbooks.org

I see the British media can actually care about the detail when it wants to

British trans people had to go to the European Court of Human Rights in 1986, 1990, 1992, 1997, 1998 and 2002 before the UK was finally forced to pass the Gender Recognition Act 2004.

How much work to regain lost rights will they need this time?

www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/...