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“... furnace and the smoky atmospherics which he calls ‘Gothic’. But the poem is dedicated to John Cowper Powys, whose Atlantis, one of his most eccentric novels, is cited as a source. As Fisher himself points out, A Furnace inherits Powys’s ‘Romantic notion’ that ‘the making of all kinds of identities is a primary impulse which the cosmos itself ...”

“... enhanced. McDowell’s peacocks are frequently dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, from Don John of Austria to the ‘tartan cowboy’, and he understates the sexual electricity of the uncoloured Victorian period – of the black and grey peacocks of the high 19th century. He prefers to think about cavalry officers and suggests that their bright colours ...”

“... author and publisher’. Idly picking up a pencil, he observed it to be the exact counterpart of John Forster: ‘short, thick, and full of lead’. A luckless would-be comrade once told him that, politically, they were rowing in the same boat: ‘but not with the same skulls,’ Jerrold replied. The most durable relics of his wit concern his fellow ...”

“... job as vicar of Doncaster. Not until 1964, when Phyllis Grosskurth published her biography of John Addington Symonds, was it revealed that Vaughan had resigned in order to avoid prosecution for sexual offences with a pupil. As late as 1955, in his essay ‘The Intellectual Aristocracy’, Noël Annan was writing (probably with a knowing wink at fellow ...”

“... Penn shows how much can be done with what does survive. He has gone through the account books of John Heron, Henry’s treasurer of the chamber, and the notebooks of Edmund Dudley; he has worked through all the diplomatic correspondence (getting a little too caught up in the baroque intrigues of Katherine of Aragon’s entourage); he has read up on the ...”

“... God answers our prayers by refusing them. Luther I A Place by the Sea Because what we think of as home is a hazard to others, our shorelines edged with rocks and shallow sandbanks                reefs where navigation fails we mark the harbour out with lights and noise: flickers of green and scarlet in the dark the long moan of a foghorn                                        when the daylight thickens and stills and even when we speak of other things our prayers include all ships                                       all those at sea navigators pilots lobster-crews the man who is yanked overboard on a line of creels whole families of boys and quiet fathers lost in a sudden squall                                 a mile from land ...”

“... Nasa has awarded the contract to build the next generation of human-manned space rocket – called, rather nicely, Orion – to a consortium headed by Lockheed Martin. This announcement was surprising for a number of reasons, but one of the most unexpected aspects was that it happened at all. The Bush administration has been so lavish with its rhetoric and promises of funding and so scanty with its delivery – in relation to the reconstructions of Afghanistan, Iraq and New Orleans, and Aids, for example – that it takes one off guard to see a pledge leading to some cash action ...”

“... A plop on the doormat and Volume 177 in the Library of America is in the house: Edmund Wilson’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, including Classics and Commercials, The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow. There is something appropriate and even – without wanting to be corny about it – moving about seeing Wilson take his place in the Library of America ...”

“... There’s no question but that the Paris imprint which has for many years past brought out the likeliest new books, novels especially, is the Editions de Minuit. They’ve managed it by being hard to please editorially (as few publishers any longer are in an age of inexplicable hospitality to authorship), the Minuit never having looked to go beyond twenty books a year ...”

“... A few years ago, a brilliant small book on detective fiction appeared in France called Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? It got talked about at the time for demonstrating, rather neatly it was thought (by the then sitting tenant of this space in the LRB, Thomas Jones, among others), that at the end of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Hercule Poirot hit on a wrong solution to the crime, that the too devious Dame Agatha had for once thrown even herself off the scent ...”

“... Some good news from the airy summits of Davos: ‘Spam,’ Bill Gates told the World Economic Forum, ‘will be solved within two years.’ Great! The problem will be fixed by the creation of a challenge-and-response system to slow down, then block, and finally – and this is the killer – charge money for unauthenticated emails. At the moment, an email can be from anybody: you can fill in the ‘from’ section of an email to claim that it is from anyone in the world, up to and including billg@microsoft ...”

“... Since the LRB went to press with the last issue, climate change has made one of its periodic appearances in the headlines, with David Cameron and Gordon Brown each making announcements about what he will do when in office. This amounts to a green beauty contest, with the public in the position of the pen-sucking judges. Cameron first. The Tory leader has hitherto, for all practical purposes, said nothing about anything: his mission has been to avoid policy commitments while making it clear his Tories were different from the party that a majority of the electorate had come to hate ...”

“... A Sense of Freedom from the paid confessions of other latterday Newgate heroes like Alfie Hinds or John McVicar is the intensely narcissistic attention Boyle turns on his early days in the Gorbals. Whereas McVicar perfunctorily stereotypes himself as the grammar-school boy perverted by his ‘milieu’ (fellow-con Charles Richardson’s Open ...”

“... Parmigianino on a half-globe of wood is the first impression which many people take away from John Ashbery’s poetry. The poem in which it appears, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a meditation on Parmigianino’s strange Mannerist painting, suddenly made Ashbery’s name much less obscure than his work. The collection to which it lent its name ...”

“... the soles of the man’s feet were burned with hot irons. In Ireland, the king’s apparatchik John Tiptoft condemned the Earl of Desmond to death for ‘horrible treasons’, then took custody of the victim’s two young sons, whom he summarily beheaded. Later, Tiptoft claimed everything he’d done had been ‘for the state’.In such an age, prudence ...”