The Night Manager

A nice touch in last night's adaptation of Le Carré's The Night Manager.

Following a misadventure in Cairo (involving, somewhat predictably, a woman, an arms dealer, and Her Majesty's Government) British-Army-officer-turned-hotelier Jonathan Pine is now four years into a seemingly self-imposed exile in Switzerland, living quietly in a sparsely-furnished bunker building near his new employment, in Zermatt.

Motivated by unfolding events, he decides to renew his contact with a government agency in 'Victoria, London', and hurries home from work to dig out their phone number. He finds it tucked inside a copy of The Letters of TE Lawrence (ed. David Garnett), at the page headed

THE YEARS OF HIDE AND SEEK: 1922 - 1929

thereby nicely tying together themes of personal mortification, (unsuccessful) reclusiveness, and - Le Carré's go-to narrative device - damn-fool heroics by not-quite-upper-middle 'English' military types interfering in things they don't understand and which they cannot possibly hope to control.

I wasn't able to make out a lot of Pine's remaining bookshelf; but it did also contain The Dynasts and, of course, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Theory of knowledge

FRENCH TEACHER*: Seven across: 'revered philosopher'.
PE TEACHER: Clarkson.

- Big School

--
* Don't bother...

Favourite footnotes: 7

This was written in response to a request from BBC Radio for a new poem. It has not been broadcast.

- Wendy Cope, 'The Poet's Song' (a poem about the second-rate poetry you hear commissioned for the radio), in Serious Concerns

Advice given to me yesterday (by a BBC executive)

Just don't turn into Jeanette Winterson.

From the horse's mouth

What no-one understands is that I'm only a 'poet' when I'm actually writing the bloody stuff!

- Dylan Thomas: A Poet in New York

Superfluita (Babylonis)

Those 10 x 10 x 10 centimetre cubes that we saw earlier...

- Click presenter

Dull sense of humour

Vote due on link between village of Dull and US town of Boring

In which the most interesting points to note are that 

1) the good people of Dull find day-to-day existence so boring (or, indeed, dull) that they count the passage of cyclists through their village; and

2) that Boring is named after a US Civil War veteran, an area of nomenclature - 'Jubiliation T Cornpone', for example - not normally troubled by an excess of boring names. (Cornpone, in case you were wondering, was born in the town of Dogpatch.)

Riddle me stat.

Who was the last player to score a try in each of his 3 first 5 or 6 Nations matches?

- John Inverdale, France-Ireland

What the Dickens?!

News just in: million-selling social commentator mined real people for material.

Five essays on Sebald

to be found starting here, on BBC iPlayer.

GODDAMN!

'Exceptional' life of Max Sebold

It is just over a decade since the author WG Sebald, or Max Sebald as he was known to friends, was killed in a car crash at the age of 57.

- BBC Today programme

... and apparently that's too long to remember how to spell his goddamn name.

BBCliché

I find myself increasingly irritated by the BBC newscasters' nanny-culture warning:

This report may contain distressing images.

When it comes to international affairs, the day the news does not involve distressing images should be the day we all stop paying our licence fees.

Non-non-domiciled?

A group of homeless men have set up home on a golf-course in East Sussex...

- BBC South East Today