Sorry for your loss.

Jonathan Stroud.

Happy birthday to you and to FH. Hope the Dirty Martinis are going down well.

I hope you’re planning boots on the ground and a double row of brassicas along the border.

The course of true love never did clean poos.

Congratulations. V much looking forward to reading it.

The rage doesn’t seek to cancel the art. It’s nothing to do with the art. I’m taking a sort of bastardized Barthesisn position: the monster author is dead…to me.

No monster too monstrous? No woman’s rage more important than a monster artist’s art?

My decision to decline to engage with an artist’s work doesn’t interfere with anyone else’s engagement with the art. I’m a fan of Muriel Spark. Her personal failings make her more interesting to me, not less. Munro crosses my line and to quote Elizabeth Bishop: Art just isn’t worth that much.

Sorry but siding with a paedophile against your own daughter is horrific for any human. Readers are allowed to apply their own standards. This isn’t the same as condemning an artist for his fiction, eg Lolita. This is case where the perpetrator admitted it and was sentenced.

It’s my understanding MS’s husband won custody in the divorce. She was living in Africa at the time, having moved there for her husband’s teaching job. He lost his job due to mental Illness. MS returned to London during the war to earn a living having arranged for her son to be sent to boarding sch.

Alexa, how hungry am I?

If you have Irish parents, you never leave on the lights unnecessarily. Even necessarily.

This is the famous photo St Paul’s taken on the night of the second great fire of London, 29th/30th December 1940. It was taken from the roof of the Daily Mail offices in Tudor St by their chief photographer, Herbert Mason. I think Humphrey Jennings’s poem I See London is about that night.

<TS Eliot voice> October is the cruellest month.