David Wheatley

A rather painful review of Stefan Collini's Literature and Learning by Daniel Karlin, who is not sure that anyone cares anymore about Arnold, Leavis, Empson and Eagleton and those other old Easter Island statues. www.the-tls.com/literature/l...

Roy Foster pronounces on The Poems of Seamus Heaney. www.the-tls.com/literature/p...

Are we to infer from this poem that Tom Paulin has belatedly made his peace with Philip Larkin?

There is a poem in the new Tom Paulin book about a Cézanne portrait of someone called Alexandre Paulin. I wonder which painting he means? The best I can do is The Card Players, whose models were apparently called Le père Alexandre and Paulin Paulet.

My word St Christopher, what a large tooth you have.

An apparition of St Martin to the anthroposophists of Deeside prior to a lantern walk in his honour.

Jeremy Noel-Tod - The Pen & the Spade Jeremy Noel-Tod: The Pen & the Spade - The Poems of Seamus Heaney by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis (edd.)

Only catching up with this now: Jeremy Noel-Tod on The Poems of Seamus Heaney. literaryreview.co.uk/the-pen-the-...

Filling in a page on my workplace's research database today, I found myself obliged to select the function marked 'create external person'.

George Moore thought this 'the most perfect prose narrative in English letters.'

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.

It's all a bit 'Chard Whitlow' for me. I notice that Davie, not unlike Eliot on the subject of Milton, came back later with some revisionist afterthoughts: www.pnreview.co.uk/archive/the-...

Stoat Poetry - About Stoat Poetry is a new, paper-based magazine operating out of the North of Scotland and Greece. Stoat aims to publish the best original poetry on any theme from new and established poets. We receive no...

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.

Newnham are under the impression that ‘alumnae’ is singular.

Aha! What would Quintilian say.

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...

Derek Mahon: A True Note – an anniversary appreciation by John Banville The Belfast-born poet, who died five years ago, left us a precious legacy of transcendent beauty, vigour, wit and profundity

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.