Poca favilla gran fiamma seconda
This letter from Bernard Richards in the 29th June TLS caught my eye: Sir, – Francis Hope spoke in his reprinted review of Nabokov’s Ada (From the Archives, June 22) of authors writing…
The Book of Silences, Volumes 1 – 23343 From the introduction to Volume 1 … the editors have found the task of compiling all the silences of recorded history a…
The Transfinite Codex From the Introduction The Infinite Annex is an annex of this library which consists entirely of infinite stories. The annex, via the use of an innovative filing…
Aphorisms (for an age beyond Aphorisms), Or, Reflections of an obsolete headshrinker by Bert Gallagher MB BCh BAO MRCPsych Published in what the author insists be referred to as the…
The only short story collection that she had selected in her lifetime, “Monday or Tuesday” is a 1921 collection in which she pursued the approach to writing set out in…
In a letter of 12 August 1977 to Robert Conquest, Kingsley Amis wrote: The Faber Book of Non-Trendy Verse has been easier and is going faster: a careful look through…
Number theory was famously described as absolutely, gloriously useless by G H Hardy, but is now vital for encryption and therefore the digital economy (and all else “e”) While looking…
The culminating image of this quote – spoken by O’Brien to Winston Smith – is famous, but the words before are as worth quoting: There will be no curiosity, no…
Séamus Sweeney 