The most beautifully weirdest of nineteenth-century novels, the Turner watercolour of English fiction.

Election fever with Louis MacNeice.

Geoffrey Hill addresses the House of Parliament in 1994.

Strange to say, Femen in medieval Tipperary was not well-stocked with topless Ukrainian feminists, writes Vona Groarke.

Balliol College has a rather unusual suggestion for a student in financial dire straits, back in the day. My word!

‘Ó thaobh céad easumhlaíocht an duine de is torthaí an chrainn toirmiscthe sin’
irishtimes.com/ireland/2024/0….

My wife told me #NoMowMay was going well and I assumed this had something to do with writing a novel?

In the event of insolvency, next week’s meeting of the Robert Browning reading group will take place in the village church café. Copies of Ferishtah’s Fancies have been left for collection behind the bus shelter.

scotsman.com/education/aber…

How might a contemporary George Eliot rewrite this opening, I wonder. Dial-up broadband versus smartphones?

‘Night comes on. Waves fold behind villages.’

Evocative (for me) description of a winter journey to Hull and ‘Wildernsea’ (Withernsea) in Lady Audley’s Secret.

Lexy Campbell, Gaelic-speaking Luddite and associate of Byron’s, transported to Tasmania for arson.

Puffy trousers, Tillydrone.

Post on village Facebook group about a currently missing-in-action cat who has a ‘phobia about people with legs’.

Belatedly catching up with Scott McKendry’s Gub.

Turning up in Ford Maddox Ford’s office for the first time, Ezra Pound sold him a ballad and lived off the proceeds for six months.

Ernest Dowson grapples with a French baker.

Caspar David Friedrich reenactment by the haar-kissed Donmouth estuary today.

Raspberry fingers!