In the Book of Judges, Jephthah does battle with the Ammonites, which you'd have to say sounds like a fairly easy victory by anyone's standards.

George Buchanan did not enjoy his Portuguese holiday (inquisition, torture), would not go again.

‘Dreein aa the dule’ of George Buchanan’s Jephthah, translated from the Latin into Scots by Robert Garioch.

Drummond of Hawthornden rhymes ‘Tasso’ and ‘asse, hoe!’

Some of the remarkable Rosicrucian carvings at nearby Edzell Castle, inspired one gathers by the work of Giordano Bruno.

Might the Wake Forest essay collection have come out by then, do you think?

9 January 1631 was ‘fatall. but happye.’ to Drummond of Hawthornden, that poet notes in a very accident-heavy chronicle of his life.

Simplify your social life by emulating Mr Pepper from Woolf’s The Voyage Out, who negotiates social gatherings by walking to the middle of the room, saying ‘Ha ha’ as loudly as he can, telling himself he has done his duty, and walking out again.

Excellent suggestion but sadly no.

Willkommen! will ich sagen (BWV 27-3) - Johann Sebastian Bach YouTube video by Wietse Meinardi

I am currently listening to all of Bach's cantatas in chronological order (an experience I can heartily recommend), and was pleasantly surprised to find Bach sampling Spring from Vivaldi's Four Seasons in this aria from cantata 27.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2iR...

I wonder what Wendy Mulford has been up to in recent years. Should she, that is, remain in the land of the living, which needless to say I hope she does. Here's a fine poem from her And suddenly supposing.

All my life I have been asking people if it was 'caliginous in the metropolis'. One day someone will give the right answer.

Granted, KM is collecting ‘millennial’ examples, but the Longley poem is quite recent and the vintage Muldoon poem… casts a long shadow.

I enjoyed the essay by Kathyrn Maris in the Little Review on poets writing about their father's penises, but has she not missed a trick in overlooking the 'courting tackle' of Michael Longley's 'Choughs', not to mention this disarming example from Paul Muldoon ('October, 1950')?

Some glimpses of Rosslyn Chapel (interior photography not allowed).

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold | Broken Sleep Books During the Late and Long Continuing Cold is a fittingly rich and various tribute to Peter Didsbury, bringing together an exceptional gathering of poets whose work bears the marks of his singular influence. Across elegy, homage, comic riff, lyric meditation and formal invention, the anthology returns again and again to the qualities that make Didsbury indispensable: his visionary exactness, his feel for the uncanny lodged inside the ordinary, his spiritual and historical reach.

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Happy eightieth birthday to that fine poet Peter Didsbury, from Sean O’Brien, me, and all the contributors to During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, a Festschrift in his honour published by Broken Sleep Books. Hoping he enjoys the work we have taken such pleasure in secretly assembling.

An interesting story about prizes and literature today.

I thought of this:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Pf...

In Craigmillar Castle.

Another fireplace from Newhailes House. Sir John Dalrymple on the left has the grim distinction of having authorised the Glencoe massacre.

Rococo fireplace, Newhailes House, Musselburgh.

Greyfriars!

Sadly truncated career means this Wardrobe never got to be a chair. Closet status not known.

A familiar face has popped up in Woolf’s The Voyage Out. With strong views on suffragism!

Delighted to find actual treason in this biographical note of a 17th century poet in an Oxford anthology (the sentence beginning ‘She bore thirteen children…’).

From the sparky and compulsive new issue of the Little Review, which I am delighted to disadorn with several prose contributions, of which the above is a sample.

In his best-selling Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton quotes a forgotten Oxford Professor of Poetry called George Gordon saying that it is the mission of Eng Lit to 'save our souls and heal the state'. Strong stuff. Except it turns out George Gordon said the complete opposite.

From a Good Friday meditation by the remarkable Aidan Mathews.

Serendipity as I turn from reading my Dryden (he’s very good you know) to Aidan Mathews, only to find a poem on the subject of that same 17th c. bard. Had it been about church architecture I expect he could have called it ‘chancel culture’.