Dennis Duncan

Hooray! Also, Dictionary People is excellent.

Hello everyone! Please help me get this out? Registration is open for the Eliot Summer program at Oxford, 5-13 July 2025. Scholarships and partial week tuition available. See you there? Send your students. Happy to support them!

Review | Can the dictionary stay relevant in the digital age? In “Unabridged,” Stefan Fatsis explores how words become enshrined in the dictionary and whether the book maker can keep up with the evolution of language.

"A warm, personal paean to Merriam-Webster and its staffers." 🙏 for this thoughtful, positive @washingtonpost.com review of UNABRIDGED by @djbduncan.bsky.social

C17 commonplace book index belonging to Whitelock Bulstrode (MS 3244, container 1.1) @ransomcenter.bsky.social. Can’t help but think immediately of @djbduncan.bsky.social and his splendid work on the history of the book index

Gimme a book with an INDEX. 😌

Oh! Ilkley Literature Fest is the best. Gorgeous town, lovely audiences, and the organisers are so friendly and thoughtful. Recommend a walk up on’t moor too if you get time. Anyway, hope It goes really well.

What Fuels Revolution, Social Embarrassment and Public Acclaim? It’s Common Knowledge.

“The line between engagingly informal and distractingly unfiltered is a delicate one…”

An observation for the ages from @djbduncan.bsky.social's sharp review of Stephen Pinker’s new book in the New York Times.
www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/b...

They are tho! That's what surprised me so much about them. I thought they were going to be tough guy action novels, but actually (to my relief) he's much more of a Sherlock Holmes. He *knows* crucial details and he's brilliant at logistics!

Prior to this summer I'd only read her book on Sartre, which frankly didn't lead me to expect that she'd be so *funny*!

Oh yes! That was one of the first ones I read. Another terrific ghastly narrator, and a wonderful rug-pulling device at the end. I love how one of her favourite jokes is the awful narrator who says, "It is clear that I must break all contact with her" then one page later, "I have sent a telegram..."

The writer's bookshelf: Dennis Duncan Eight questions about writers, books, and reading…

I really enjoyed answering @mathewlyons.bsky.social's questions about my favourite books, which brought out patterns I hadn't noticed in the things I like. I'd recommend to anyone having a think about how you'd answer. open.substack.com/pub/mathewly...

The writer's bookshelf: Dennis Duncan Eight questions about writers, books, and reading…

New on the Writer’s Bookshelf: eight questions about writers, books, and reading with the brilliant @djbduncan.bsky.social
– featuring Alistair MacLean, Georges Perec, Charlotte Brontë, Iris Murdoch and much more!

(It also includes a surprise appearance from a would-be prime minister.)

What Fuels Revolution, Social Embarrassment and Public Acclaim? It’s Common Knowledge.

On S. Pinker's new book, by @djbduncan.bsky.social: "There is a certain charm to the affable, playfully bumptious professor who can’t resist the provocation of scare quotes around the word 'microaggressions'", "A book can be bad without its thesis being untrue." #Booksky #psychology #anthropology

What Fuels Revolution, Social Embarrassment and Public Acclaim? It’s Common Knowledge.

I reviewed Steven Pinker's new book on common knowledge. Tl;dr: "A book can be bad without its thesis being untrue".

Did the Middle Ages really happen? Couple of recent reviews of Marcus Glatt's "The Greatest Hoax in History".

The Eternal and the Ephemeral I seek, at once, both the eternal and the ephemeral. It’s a line from the French writer Georges Perec. Perec, you may remember, is most famous – notorious – for writing La Disparition (or A Void in it...

A blog about Perec, cafes, and what I did on my birthday
open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Much to love in this "Out of the Ordinary" auction catalogue, but the thing that tickled me the most is this advertising poster for lemonade "bottled by pretty girls". The past sure is a foreign country. www.sworder.co.uk/auction/lot/...

Oh! Can I add the gradgrindian inchworm that Danny Kaye sings about in “Hans Christian Andersen” (1953)

In Defence of Posh Spice Or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading

A little blog about Posh Spice and What We Talk About When We Talk About Reading
open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

[Lady Bracknell voice]: “A yearwig?!”

Found today pasted into a 1744 Oxford-printed Bible: an unrecorded ephemeral printing of ‘A cure for the bite of a mad dog’, directing us to ‘give three spoonfuls morning & evening; one pint is sufficient for man or beast’. It is ‘never known to fail’. @theulspeccoll.bsky.social 7100.b.73. #ephemera

Lost Dog! Please return to Mr D'Wolf

Would *you* return a puppy to a Mr D'Wolf? Some thoughts on a two-hundred-year-old lost dog poster.
open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Lost Dog! Please return to Mr D'Wolf

Would *you* return a puppy to a Mr D'Wolf? Some thoughts on a two-hundred-year-old lost dog poster.
open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Scathing personal critisism via an indexn has excellent entertainment value. Courtesy of 'Index, A History of the: A bookish adventure' by @djbduncan.bsky.social

On Reading Other People In which we come at last to the orts

Still circling around scraps, a blog about Donne, Hamlet, Virginia Woolf and metaphors of people as books. scrapsandorts.substack.com/p/on-reading...

Dennis Duncan - Sacred Scraps Dennis Duncan: Sacred Scraps

I did a little diary for the @litreview.bsky.social about picking up scraps in the street.
literaryreview.co.uk/sacred-scraps

How to Do the Uffizi And St Augustine's wastepaper basket

In which I blog about How to Do the Uffizi!
open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Don't Eat the Trifle! The Case of the Mystic Writing Pad

A little thing I wrote about Freud, Agatha Christie & Dorothy L. Sayers
open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...

Looking at guitars on the internet. Here’s a brand I hadn’t heard of before.

What Have You Got in Your Pockets? And how to look after a duck

More blogging. On collecting ephemera from people in the street. Also contains advice on how to look after a duck. open.substack.com/pub/scrapsan...