Art Kavanagh

My original Talk about books post in July 2022 about Ted Chiang’s novella/long short story, “Anxiety is the dizzyness of freedom” had no page references because I worked from an ebook/online edition. I just updated the post to add page references from the Picador paperback of Exhalation 📚

John Newell, a County Down man … infiltrated the United Irishmen rebel group in 1796 and helped to imprison 200 members. Newell was paid £2,000 by the authorities and with remarkable hubris boasted about his exploits in a tell-all book. He ended up abducted, shot and secretly buried in County Antrim.

I hope he had time to spend his £2,000 first. Grisly secrets of the ‘disappeared’ of Anglo-Irish war uncovered by research

I’ve just posted in Talk about books: a second visit to Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at the first book, Case Histories 📖, which I hadn’t reread when I wrote the first post.

Christopher Priest died just over a week ago. I’m not familiar with his writing, having read only one book by him. That was The Prestige (1995). Here’s my review (originally posted on Google+, now on my personal site). I haven’t reread the book since writing that review, so my opinions about it haven’t changed, but those about Nolan’s film have. I’ve finally given up trying to persuade myself that I like or admire any of them apart from the first two.

Hard to believe it’s 25 years since the Pinochet appeals and Lord Hoffman’s extraordinary mistake. Joshua Rozenberg has an excellent recap. As usual, I’m surprised how much detail I’d forgotten.

When you have a useful thing worth money and regularly leave it outdoors, ingenuity and an angle grinder will come for you in the end. You have to see yourself not so much as the bike’s owner as its foster carer, and just hope its next home will appreciate it.

Zoe Williams’s bike has been stolen. It’s an experience I’ve had too often, though I’m relieved to say that the last time was 30 years ago.

The latest Talk about books post is about Bernard MacLaverty’s short stories in Blank Pages and other stories (2021). The vulnerabilities and indignities of age are his great theme in many of these late stories.

The first time I ever saw Liam Neeson act it was in “My Dear Palestrina”, a television dramatization by Bernard MacLaverty of his short story of the same title. I was deeply impressed by Neeson’s performance and MacLaverty’s story alike, and left with the strong hunch that MacLaverty was one of the best short story writers alive. Yet, over the next 40 years, I read at most two more of his short stories.

Earlier this week I was surprised to learn that Ivor Browne had, until just a few days ago, still been alive. I hadn’t heard anything about him for decades. Now, he’s turned up in Ted Gioia’s The Honest Broker

Has Substack changed the way it handles link previews? I stopped including Twitter card meta tags in my blog posts about a year ago. For a while I replaced them with OG meta tags but I dropped all except OG:image because the others were just repeating what was already in the default meta tags.

My blog hasn’t been updating for the past few days. I just want to see if a new post will dislodge it.

Hi @help @manton There’s something strange going on with my blog. The log is full of lines like this

Publish: Already queued, scheduling +30 seconds

and it never finishes publishing. Any idea what’s up? Thanks.

I think I might disable crossposting from Micro.blog to BlueSky (the only place I have it enabled) because more often than not, once I’ve posted something on MB, I go straight over to BlueSky and delete the crosspost. Other hand, it’s nice being able to post proper links on 🦋 🤷🏻‍♂️

In the long run, student plagiarists are mostly harming themselves, and so we should discourage them from plagiarism for the same reason that we discourage them from binge drinking or unprotected sex: for their own good.

Thoughtful and sensible piece by Tim Harford on plagiarism and related questions: The rights and wrongs of copying

My apologies to everybody who follows my newsletter, Talk about books, by RSS. The RSS for yesterday’s post, about Robert Browning’s poem, “My Last Duchess” went a bit haywire halfway through, and apparently stopped recognizing the angle brackets in html tags. I don’t know why this happened but it seems to have something to do with the fact that I used em spaces to indent the lines of poetry. The web version of the post is displaying correctly, if you’d like to read it there.

Here is the first Talk about books post of 2024. “I choose Never to stoop”: Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”. The monologue is more effective as drama if we don’t assume that the Duke’s negotiations with the Count’s emissary end in success.

In 1936, Louis S Friedland claimed to identify the historical figures portrayed by Robert Browning in “My Last Duchess” (1842). According to Friedland, the poem’s speaker, the Duke, is Alfonso d’Este, fifth Duke of Ferrara, and the person he is addressing is Nikolaus Madruz, an emissary representing Ferdinand, Count of Tyrol. The count is one of the sons of Ferdinand I, Emperor of Austria. Before his death, Ferdinand I had almost concluded negotiations — the amount of the dowry had been agreed — for the marriage of his daugheter, Barbara, to Alfonso.

SEC Twitter account hacked; Twitter says two-factor authentication wasn’t enabled. Is it legal for Twitter to make it public whether 2FA is enabled on an account? Should it be?

Existential crises are also a recent phenomenon, and involve a use of the word “existential” you won’t find in any dictionary. It … means “actually existing”. So an existential crisis is an actually existing one, which is the only kind of crisis you’re likely to come across.

Terry Eagleton quibbles with The perversion of the English language. I thought an existential crisis was one that threatened the existence of the thing affected, a situation that might kill, destroy or end (rather than merely damage) it.

… the kinds of book I am most likely to abandon are history and theology; the kinds I am least likely to abandon are novels and biographies.

writes Alan Jacobs. That makes perfect sense to me, substituting “literary criticism” for “theology”.

The last Talk about books post of 2023 is about Emma Healey’s two novels, 📖Elizabeth Is Missing (2014) and Whistle in the Dark (2018). Happy New Year, all. The next post will be on 10 Jan or a few days later.

When I see someone reading a book on the train, I usually try to see what the title is and who wrote it. I suppose I like to know which books attract different kinds of reader. One day in 2015, I was on a train in France and noticed a woman reading a book with the title L’Oubli by an author I’d never heard of before, Emma Healey. I immediately guessed that the book was a translation from the English.

Bandcamp has a previously unreleased live album by Mads Vinding, recorded 2018, with Dado Moroni on piano 🎹. I’m very tempted, except for a 9-minute version of “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise”, perhaps my least favourite standard 🎶

Mince, Delors! Jacques Delors destroyed the European left. Actually, I don’t agree with much of this analysis but I think it’s worth reading.

… although not an especially good cook, Eve is always ready with sage advice about the arts of the kitchen. One of her more irritating sayings is “you can’t bake when you’re angry,” and Villanelle is incandescent when she bakes the lemon cake.

Part 6 of Killing Eve: Resurrection is now on Substack. Eve Polastri has been snatched from their St Petersburg apartment and Villanelle must wait for the kidnappers to let her know what they want. Patience is a virtue but it’s not one of her virtues.