A friend of a friend recently asked me what I thought of John Keats. In 2009, I was cycling down Grafton Road, near Gospel Oak in north London, on my…
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February 2023

Dudley Fenner’s The artes of logike and rethorike, plainelie set foorth in the English tounge is a 1584 guide to speaking well and persuasively, based…

January 2023

AI: ChatGPT
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December 2022

[Tom Phillips died on 28 November 2022. Here is a piece I wrote on Phillips’s great work, A Humument, for the London Review of Books, ten years ago.] On…
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I’ve been enjoying reading Vast (1994) by Doug Huston. As Huston’s punning pseudonym ‘Moore Lande’ suggests, it’s a Western, and the author glories in…
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November 2022

This is a page from a copy of Philip Gaskell’s John Baskerville: A Bibliography (Cambridge University Press, 1959). When I recently took the book out of…
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October 2022

The problem of what to do with stuff. When my grandfather died, he left a number of plastic bags full of papers and documents. Had he been illustrious…
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September 2022

A colophon, from the Greek for ‘summit’ or ‘finishing touch’, is a short piece of text, typically at the end of a book, giving details of some…
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The village of Great Tew, Oxfordshire, was famous in the 1630s as a gathering point for intellectuals who, reclining in the comfortable surroundings of…

August 2022

Here is a postcard written on 15th August 1931 by Mary, sent to Miss Lenton in south-east London. The front of the card is a view of the crescent of…
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July 2022

In A Passage (Granary Books, 1994), Buzz Spector printed the same passage of text on every page of a 181-page book that was bound in a conventional…
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1. Pavel Büchler (b. 1952) Pavel Büchler’s Idle Thoughts is a collection of the artist’s diaries covering the years 2003, 2004, 2005, 2007-8, and…
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