03.01.06

Turris Babel

Posted in Forteana, Books at 10:05 am by Jon

Athanasius Kircher's illustration of the Tower of Babel

Athanasius Kircher’s illustration of the Tower of Babel, as posted on the just-found blog of the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. You may wish to follow up with Kircher’s sketch demonstrating exactly why the tower couldn’t have reached the moon (it would have been so large that it would have tipped the Earth out of balance.

The Kircherblog, in the spirit of the man, covers everything from Kircher’s own notorious cat piano to feral children (a topic of interest to Kircher because of the chance they might spontaneously speak the original Adamic language) to buildings made out of trees and shaped as elephants.

Sometimes I still love the internet as a child loves its favourite bear. This is why.

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01.07.06

Oily noog

Posted in Books at 8:11 am by site admin

Some miniature delights.

The author of the hoax Betjeman letter mentioned below has identified himself, and to nobody’s great surprise, it was rival biographer Bevis Hillier. A literary banker if ever there was.

Football, which I don’t talk about much, but do follow, rarely offers up memorable lines. Savour then this from France manager Raymond Domenech on the increasingly irritating Chelsea boss Jose Mourinho:

He is the best coach in the world, he said so himself.

Finally, from Jared Diamond’s enthralling Guns, Germs and Steel, which for 378 pages has been patiently scientific and relentlessly prosaic, this moment of inadvertantly Carollian verse:

Most [plants domesticated in the Sohel zone of northern Africa] are still grown mainly just in Ethiopia and remain unknown to Amercians - including Ethiopia’s narcotic chat, its banana-like ensete, its oily noog

The oily noog goes right on the list of things that I must see.

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08.22.05

Enlightenment reading

Posted in Books at 12:20 am by Jon

So much time is spent bemoaning the tiny things that irritate or depress that I suspect far too little is spent celebrating those tiny things that increase joy by a quantum.

So.

Downstairs, in the main room, there are four ceiling height bookcases, all down one wall. This is the first pleasure.

The end ones were already here upon arrival. I fabricated the middle two to match, though I fear not from the same riotously expensive old wood. They look, however, about right.

On each bookcase sits one of those pebblish lights from Habitat. This is very much the second pleasure.

In fact, the lights are what Habitat called ‘Pebbles’, and are just the sort of off-round that invites an appreciative stroke of the hand. Habitat, in their wisdom, replaced ‘Pebbles’, with ‘Eggs’ a couple of years ago: taller and clearly ovoid, the new shape exudes a slightly pointy unapproachability for reasons I can’t really pin down.

Thus, the awareness that the pebbles are not eggs, coupled with the wrongness of the decision to replace one with the other, invests the former with all the additional qualities lacking in the latter. This is, if we’re counting, pleasure 2 b).

The third pleaure, however, is simultaneously the smallest, and the one we’re gathered here to discuss.

One of the pebble lights is cunningly set up to light up at the gentlest nudge of a book. This childish joy is no doubt the product of too many childhood hours reading stories of espionage, or watching venerable horror films in which creaking bookcases open onto vistas of wonder.

The cataloguing of the tiny delights is nearly complete, but the alert among you will have already leapt ahead to the final joy, the ever-important Pleasure No. 3 b).

The identity of the book.

The initial set-up was, of course, accidental, and I took an appropriately incidental pleasure that the volume involved at that stage was The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing. This foursquare acknowledgement of the effect’s proper place gently amused me for a few months. Finally, a wholesale rearrangement of the bookcases was required, resulting in the shelf in question housing slightly smaller books.

This left an interesting question. Where, thematically, to go from here? I quickly ruled out the most obvious candidates: anything about the Enlightenment, the Bible (forcing the internal pantomime of “fiat lux” every single bloody time).

The second round of choices were far more interesting.

First up, I spotted my copy of Harry Houdini’s fraud-busting Miracle Mongers and Their Methods, which appealed for its Wizard of Oz implications, but slipped by because the book itself featues intemperate expositions of fraudsters long since forgotten.

Then, I looked to see what blind chance had provided, as I had stacked along the shelf books that were simply of the right size. The historically inevitable consequence was that Collected Writings of Karl Marx had control of the means of illumination. Hm. Workable, and useful for winding up the neighbours, but otherwise dubious. In fact, anything political, up to and including Blair’s Wars is just not a good long-term bet.

Swiftly, the ground seemed to open up. What about Carl Sagan’s The Demon-haunted World for its spotlight on flannel? Leprohon’s The Italian Cinema because cinema is all about shining a light into the darkness? What about sheer illumination: Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (I swiftly discovered that I had no Hume). Darwin’s On the Origin of Species? Gibbon, Plato, Randi or Popper? Borges, Sciascia, DeLillo or Nairn? Science or art? Ancient or modern? A work of philosophy or one of Alan Moore’s comics?

A decision had to be made, not least because it was becoming increasigly difficult to explain why, with piles of books almost if not literally everywhere on the floor, I was dithering endlessly over the precise position of one. Ultimately, I plumped for the book which seemed to fulfil the demands of thematic aptness while being the least immediately obvious choice to hand.

I chose John Man’s Genghis Khan: Life, Death and Resurrection, because Genghis is a lazy byword for the bringing of darkness, when he was more like the Alexander or Napoleon of his time, the builder of an empire nearly twice the size of Rome’s. I also chose it because I have a primitive joy in the way the very name Genghis Khan is recolonising the Mongolian lands: as families forcibly dispossessed of their tribal names three or four generations ago are encouraged to pick them up again, where they simply can’t remember they almost inevitably decide that they must be Khans. The equivalent is every Arthur in Britain deciding that his surname should be “Pendragon”.

Finally, because the book is the right size, and let no man ever deny the progress of a good book when it is made to be the right size.

Picture me pushing Genghis Khan’s nose every evening, and smile as I smile.

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07.27.05

On goalkeepers

Posted in Dreaming of England, Books at 12:23 pm by Jon

Albert Camus, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Vladimir Nabokov, Pope John Paul II, all linked by one important characteristic: they were goalkeepers.

We have talked of goalkeepers before, and we will again, perhaps in comparison to wicket-keepers.

To this short list, of famous net-minders, I’m pleased to note that we can add Niels Bohr, Nobel prize for physics and all.

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07.15.05

Novel without words

Posted in Forteana, Books at 4:45 pm by Jon

Word reaches us of the most Oulipan project imaginable: a novel consisting entirely of punctuation. Woops are heard from the direction of the last resting places of Calvino and Perec.

On closer examination, the ‘novel’ by Hu Wenliang consists of 14 Chinese punctuation marks. Barely a novella, you would feel, but I suspect that the standards in word-free writing are rather different. There is one stunning advantage to this brevity, of course, news reports can carry the novel in full:

：？
：！
“‘……’”
（、）·《，》
；——

Hm. Really. Hm.

Hu is offering a prize to anyone who can get the novel (which, he says, has character descriptions and a proper plot - a love story) 80% right. So, leaving aside the fact that we’re looking at an English transliteration of punctuation in one or other Chinese script, let’s give it a crack:

Colin says ‘Well?’
Coleen says ‘Well really!”
He talks, she talks, he talks. Once inside, sex, full, stops. Gradually they fall silent.
Her parent(hese)s are com(ma)ing back with a bullet - she(v)runs one way, she(v)runs the other.
See my Colin? He too dashes.

[Translators note: I can’t guarantee that the characters will represent properly on this page. Please refer to the China Daily news article for the definitive English punctuation. By far the most difficult line was the third. I was determined that I could get something like ‘everything points to sex(six)’ from six full stops in a row, but it proved intractable. So I fell back on a cheap pun, sexual frisson and some poetic license. Who would have thought punctuation could get so explicit? For the fourth line, I couldn’t determine the correct name for “、”, so I lazily went for ‘comma back’. I knew you wouldn’t mind. Improvements most welcome. For what it’s worth, this could well be a hoax. The China Daily hack’s name, you will have noted, is Ng Ting Ting. For that on its own, I hope this is real.]

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06.08.05

Regret the error

Posted in Meeja, Books at 4:25 pm by Jon

From the otherwise fabulously pointless Regret the error site comes this beauty, collected from the National Post in Canada:

In a letter to the editor from Andrew Burrowes in Tuesday’s National Post, a quotation from a previous letter-writer, Robert Randall, in Mondays Post, should have read “prejudice against homosexuals … should not be tolerated in this country, even when masquerading as ‘religious freedom.’ ” A word was incorrectly omitted in Tuesday’s Post. The Post regrets the error.

The site almost has no need to point out exactly which word was omitted. At which point we all, like giggling schoolboys, recall the 1631 so-called ‘Adulterer’s Bible’ which spectacularly omitted ‘not’ from the seventh commandment.

While we’re noting things from things, please do brush up your knowledge of scrap-metal dealing in Kazakhstan (particularly this, although you can skip slide 11 if you are of a sensitive nature.

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05.20.05

Like a fiery envelope

Posted in Books at 12:50 pm by Jon

Given that I (reputedly) have about four books on the go at once, I really ought to love exercises of turning books into blogs. There’s a new one out of Stoker’s Dracula. The gimmick is simple: post novels in diary form as diaries, with the posts synchronised to appear on the date they’re supposed to in the novel. You can try your own too.

It’s a charming game, and I applaud it for pushing some classic works (such as Pepys’ Diary out in a fresh format. However, the novel-as-diary format just doesn’t work well for me. It may be that Pepys’ Diary, which is appearing with helpful annotations, is better suited to daily installments. A novel surely is not; Alexander McCall Smith’s recent attempt at a daily novel for The Scotsman is typically elegant, but rather unsatisfactory in novel form, and I suspect was unsatisfactory for parallel reasons in its original newspaper version.

Dracula is surely not meant to be read in daily paragraphs. The momentum of the story will not take it. The intensity of the thing, let alone the reader’s retention of storylines, will be stretched beyond reason.

Perhaps I am being unfair. I can only comprehend reading the thing in batches in the monthly archive: I haven’t reset my world to accommodate reading daily dispatches from these sites, although perhaps I should give it a sincere effort.

Surely, though, Dracula, with its mix of journal items and letters from different hands, would be better served by being emailed: subscribe to the email-novel and you will receive a chronologically arranged stream of emails from the various narrators over the course of the novel. I’d far prefer to spot a little envelope in the corner of my screen alerting me to an urgent missive from Mr Harker. If you’re going to do it, do it properly.

I say that, and I know that Andy in particular will now be thinking of the logical extension. Reset the novel as a series of letters, postcards, phone calls, emails, parcels containing journals, anything and everything necessary.

Imagine a copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses that arrived as a keepsake box full of letters.

It would be the devilish offspring of Dennis Wheatley, Nabokov, Nick Bantock and BS Johnson. It would be tremendously expensive, tremulously arcane and terribly good fun.

Only one question remains: which novel to do first?

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04.26.05

The unintentional joy of bookshops

Posted in Books at 6:59 pm by Jon

When I have time to kill, I like to sacrifice it in a bookshop. I always rather thought that this was an active choice on my part: I’m a reader, and unexpectedly upturning a joyous title can make my day. One recent acquisition, Ben Macintyre’s Josiah the Great is just so promising that I dare not read it for fear of spoiling its current bookshelf perfection. I’ve come to believe, though, that killing time in the bookshop is not a simple desire: it’s a practical response to the problem that ten minutes in a bookshop is wasted time. It requires at least half an hour to puncture the gaudy surface of bestsellers and find the meats within.

In fact, I suspect that my bookshelves are just a bookshop manqué. I am more than happy to buy books in the knowledge that they will sit on the shelves for years before being read. I am frequently surprised to find books I’d forgotten I’d acquired on my shelves, providing that authentic moment of bookshop discovery right at home.

Conversely, like any book-lover, I can confidently put my hand on almost any book I know I possess, making redundant any need for a cataloguing system. Books are grouped possibly by size, cover or indeed colour, but rarely by any kind of librarian logic. Book lovers will recognise too the seamlessness with which an hour can slip past just browsing your own bookshelves. My eyes tickle over the spines of a hundred titles on my way to doing some petty, important task. I am constantly refamiliarising myself with them, opening them, tending them with my attention like a gardener stroking the leaves of his plants. No wonder I can find them all. They are, in the argot, part of an ongoing conversation in myself, as objective and sensible as friends in orienting the world around me.

There is also here, I suppose, the idea of reading by osmosis. There are books with which you settle onto a cushion of some type and read. Then there are titles that float around you for so long, fall under your fingers so many times, are browsed, ruffled, index raided, delved into, that they become effectively read. At that, they are read in a less trustworthy, more insinuating way; read without an opportunity ever to formally reject them. There is no putting these books down, because you are always putting them down, and picking them up. They are replaced in the bookshelves so many times that they will never be thrown into the corner of the room in digust, no matter how deserving.

Anyway, anyway. My bookshelves inform my feelings towards bookshops so deeply and perversely that I am foolishly disappointed when I spend time in a real bookshop. As I indicated before, ten minutes in a bookshop is wasted time, because there is barely time to browse past the rubbish and start seeing what is really there.

So, today, I had a thunderstruck few minutes when I entered the bookshop, comprehending just how much chaff has been created by Dan Brown’s bloody book. This takes the form of four types of book:

The (unacknowledged) inspiration
The laborious commentary
deathly parody (and if it requires the subtitle “A Parody”, you know there’s trouble)
Other books by the author that nobody bought the first time round
Last, and certainly least, books with a similar cover

I ran, ran past the bestsellers and spent my time in the shop keeping out of beady eyeline of the pile-em-high tables at the front. This meant I was in the gloomy lowlands of the history, science and art sections, but I was happy enough.

Remind me, next time, to outline my theory that books can be chosen according to a careful analysis of their cover against strict criteria. It is a little like card-counting, but altogether less likely to get you kneecapped in Las Vegas.

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04.22.05

Molloy sucking stones

Posted in Books, Cricket at 12:24 pm by Jon

I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of
sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones. Yes, on
this occasion I laid in a considerable store. I distributed them
equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn
about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following
way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these
being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my
greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and
putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my
greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I
replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I
replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had
finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my
four pockets, but not quite the same stones.

And so on, and on. This is, of course, Beckett’s Molloy speaking, from the Trilogy. I’ve been doing a lot of geeky snooping around sites dealing with so-called Lifehacks, and rather marvellously, I noticed someone linking to the stone-sucking sequencein ‘Molloy’, labelling it as a ‘lifehack’.

Let’s hope not, eh?

By the by, I always supposed that this sequence reflects Beckett’s cricketing youth (second time I’ve linked to that information). I imagine young S. Beckett standing in the field watching the umpire moving a stone from right pocket to left after each delivery, thinking “There’s got to be something in that.”

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01.04.05

Disambiguating Hamlet

Posted in Dreaming of England, Online memory, Books at 1:35 pm by

Bless the Wikipedia and all its funny little ways.

I was chasing an allegation that the term ‘hamlet’ refers to a village which is supported by orchards (Wikipedia disagrees, stating that it is, in Britain, purely an ecclesiastical distinction). Of course, on my way I passed through Hamlet disambiguation, which led to the Hamlet legend, which led to Saxo Grammaticus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, which led to…

I forget where it led next, or indeed where I thought I was going in the first place. I have to admit, though, that the encyclopedia is the one type of labyrinth in which one enjoys getting lost more than finding the way.

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11.05.04

Defiant thinking

Posted in Books at 10:53 am by

Harder, sadder minds than mine might look at the big events of this week and conclude that we are living in an age of happy ignorance, where good ol’ boys will vote for a smug, rapacious oligarch because he acts like a cowboy.

This is, of course, utterly untrue. We are living in a time of unhappy ignorance.

It feels horribly like an act of defiance against the times to point at acts of unequivocal, unashamed knowledge-mongering.

Take the electronic publication of the venerable Dictionary of the History of Ideas. I did, and was unsurprised that I found myself drawn first to the article on Faust (or, as I have always felt makes more sense for a typically self-made humanist chancer, Faustus).

The first paragraph of the article quotes Abbot Tritheim writing in 1507 about one “Magister Georgius Sabellicus, Faustus junior, fons necro-
manticorum, astrologus, magus secundus, chiromanticus,
a�romanticus, pyromanticus, in hydra arte secundus“.

I’m not saying it’s necessarily a bad thing, but you really don’t get many aeromantics these days.

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10.27.04

The mysterious behaviour of books

Posted in Books at 1:36 pm by

As I found last week, when have you taken down all of your books, an immutable law of the universe dictates that they will no longer all fit back into the shelves.

As I found today, however, the same law does not apply to bookshops. There, a reorganisation of the shelves invariably means that you end up with fewer books on display.

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The mysterious behaviour of books

Posted in Books at 1:29 pm by

As I found last week, when have you taken down all of your books, an immutable law of the universe dictates that they will no longer all fit back into the shelves.

As I found today, however, the same law does not apply to bookshops. There, a reorganisation of the shelves invariably means that you end up with fewer books on display.

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08.13.04

Flow My Tears, Philip K Dick Said

Posted in Books at 5:32 pm by

If you ever think you’re having a particularly odd day, stop and consider a while the phenomenally (or perhaps phenomenogically) strange life of Philip K. Dick, professional questioner of reality.

This absolutely characteristic essay (titled ‘How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later’) gives you a sense of how endlessly weird it must have been to be the man who, as he indicated himself, had two basic questions: “What is reality?” and “What constitutes the authentic human being?”

One of the most destabilising things about Dick was that, like Borges, he was an intellectual magpie: he read widely if not deeply. This allowed him to flutter down onto an idea, strip it out of context and reuse it in a way that had never been intended. The results were often logically unkempt, but always interesting. Watch him do it here:

In Plato’s Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

Much of this particular essay is devoted to a serious of coincidences Dick experiences after completing one of his later novels, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said. He comes to wonder if he is actually living in AD 50, experiencing the events of the Book of Acts, and it is only the existence of Disneyland that reassures him that this is not the case.

The uncanny thing is, you quite believe him.

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08.10.04

Le Cool

Posted in Books at 5:22 pm by

Andy is back on the alternately baking hot and soaking wet streets of London (for a while) and, look, he brings with him a very cool guidebook on Barcelona.

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07.09.04

Index of the year

Posted in Books at 5:42 pm by

It seems it’s official: Francis Wheen’s pugnacious How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World has the index of the year. Samples of its uncompromising micronarrative style are easy to pick:

Aitken, Jonathan: admires risk-takes, 59; goes to jail, 60

Merton, Robert: says markets aren’t too volatile, 272, loses fortune because of market volatility, 273

tycoons 29; as heroes, 59,277-8; sexiness of, 40; superstitions of, 56; wearing socks in bed, 60

In fact in some respects the index is rather better than the slightly disorganised book itself (see, again, Philip Hensher on the index).

Now news comes that not only have Wheen’s American publishers renamed the book for the US market (it’s now “Idiot Proof”), they’ve redone the index, taking out the wit and screwing up the page numbers in the process. Proof, if needed, that nothing in this world is too delicate to be stamped all over by a publisher.

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07.01.04

Hareios Poter

Posted in Books at 5:41 pm by

I’ve already mentioned it in the linkbar on the right, but you really should take a gander at this page by the translator of Harry Potter into ancient Greek.

The question of how best to translate has always taxed even the nimblest linguists and the most poetical of scholars. In essence, the translator must find a satisfactory point along the continuum that runs from ‘what the original author must have meant’ to ‘what sounds best in the destination language’. The problem is clearly seen in attempting to translate idiomatic phrases (such as ‘as happy as Larry’), but will occur throughout.

The problems are usually seen, though, in the light of wishing to translate a living language into another living language, or from a dead language into a living one. Andrew Wilson’s experience in translating a modern book into ancient Greek isn’t unique (I have a copy of the fabula de petro cuniculo tucked away somewhere), but it is very unusual, and his comments on the exercise are fascinating.

He’s particularly good on the problem of translating fictional names. Now, for most translations you wouldn’t bother even translating the names - maybe just tidy up the endings a little - but Wilson has made a serious attempt to acknowledge that the names in fiction (not always, but certainly, as with so much children’s fiction, in JK Rowling) are intended to trigger associations.

So, Voldemort, by name alone, must be a villain. Wilson goes for Pholidomortos, meaning ‘Scaly Death’. Hareios Poter himself means ‘goblet belonging to Ares’, which seems a good compromise between homophony and meaning.

I was most pleased, though, to learn of the untranslatable Greek verb phthano, meaning, according to Wilson, “I do something before someone else realises that I’m doing it”. It is, you must agree, a vital concept. The next time I’m asked what I’m doing, I’ll reply that I’m just phthanying about.

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06.18.04

Into views

Posted in Books at 2:16 pm by

Another rollicking Alan Moore interview:

On becoming a magician:

About ten years ago now, in 1993, when I turned 40, I suddenly decided to announce that I’d become a magician, just for a bit of a laugh really. But everyone took me seriously, so then I had to actually do some magic.

On the illustrations for the new edition of Voice of the Fire:

One of the big advantages - and probably why I really agreed to it - is that I’m the writer of the last chapter, so he had to take a glamorous-looking picture of me. I think my extraordinary physical beauty really does deserve a full-page picture, instead of one of those little panels on the back cover. I’m looking forward to that. I still don’t know if anyone will be able to make heads or tails of the novel itself, but when they find the text incomprehensible, they can always sit and stare at the pictures for an hour or two.

On the usual rumours (including the one that he is a recluse):

I don’t venture far outside. I mean, even the other end of the living room is a bit of a mystery to me.

Has it occurred to anyone yet that Alan Moore has given up comics in order to spend more time with his interviews?

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06.17.04

Now, sometime, never

Posted in Books at 1:40 pm by

I suppose that there are three categories of books that to which we must address ourselves: those we haven’t yet finished (for me at the moment, a reprehensible half dozen, plus an unknown number I’ve probably forgotten); those we are yet to read; those that we will not read.

Yesterday’s comments by Julian Cope on the goalkeeper as shaman reminded me of one of the books I’m currently reading, Carlo Ginzburg’s bold thesis on witchcraft, Ecstasies. Ginzburg, of course, draws attention to survivals of shamanistic cults from early modern times to the present. In particular, he finds evidence of shamanistic practices where witches fly on certain nights armed with strange weapons (such as sticks of sorrel) and do battle with opposing groups of witches, sometimes from nearby villages. Can I be alone in detecting a continuum between this, European-originated team sports such as football and hockey, and Quidditch? I doubt Ms Rowling read Ginzburg before inventing Harry Potter, so we must be looking at a folk memory re-emerging periodically along highly structured symbolic axes.

As to what I will be reading, there’s little question: it’s the excellent Jonathan Coe’s excellent biography of BS Johnson, here reviewed in the New Statesman (though the reviewer, in describing Coe as a ‘traditional’ novelist, is clearly forgetting the playful construction of Oh What a Carve Up!.

Finally, I won’t be reading Ulysses, at least not in this page-a-day version. The idea works for Leonardo’s notebooks because they weren’t designed to be read as a narrative. Ulysses was, so sit down and read it at least a chapter at a time, idlers. It’s not as impenetrable as it’s made out to be, not by half.

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06.09.04

Who are your friends by?

Posted in Books at 3:45 pm by

The Deep North, mirabile dictu, is celebrating its return from (ahem) its brief, unannounced hiatus with a sequence of just the most wonderful notes from the north.

The bucolic pageantry of a local christening was, I thought, tremendous enough for one week’s dispatches, but it seems the northern contingent have discovered a better game again:

Who wrote your friends?

Casting around those I know best, I find they are a mixture of characters from Fielding (Helen, not Henry), Amis père et fils* and J.G. Ballard. My family were clearly written, for the most part, by Harold Pinter. My mate Paul is evidently by William Gibson with intertextual references to Beckett.

Andy is, I would suggest, from the novel that defeated Alex Garland and Dr B surely occurs somewhere in Malcolm Bradbury’s early novels.

But what of the Northern Professor and the Lady Novelist? A wealth of possibilities suggest themselves. Is the Professor from Chesterton, Arturo Perez-Reverte or (shudder) the start of an MR James chiller? Is the Lady Novelist by Iris Murdoch, Margery Allingham or A.S. bloody Byatt?

No no no. None of those is close. It’s clear to me now; both of them are evidently, naturally, from one of the Lady Novelist’s own novellas - an act of by-one’s-own-bootstraps self-generative impossibilia of which Borges himself would have been proud.

* I’m delighted in a suitably hard-nosed fashion to be identified as being written by Amis M. Better, I think, than being Amis M.

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