Favourite footnotes: 10

This article was amended on 12 January 2016: in the picture caption, Matthew Collings was initially misidentified as William Boyd; the painting by Stephen Finer was wrongly attributed by the provider to David Bowie

- The Guardian (but of course), in a William Boyd article about an artist he and Bowie had made up

Not from Blackadder(?) - 3

As you wrestle with the rantings of Austria's most lethal watercolourist...

- Richard Lea, in The Guardian

'Life is too short for Martin Amis.'

Amen to that, motherfucker.

Also, Will Self.

'Trepverter'

Because the French have no word for 'l'esprit de l'escalier'.

(With thanks to the Guardian's 'education' pages...)

Bad Sex - with Ben Okri

A writer writes what they write and that’s all there is to it.

- the former Booker-winner 'graciously' responds to the announcement of his victory

(Congrats due to his editor and his publicist for their significantly better efforts.)

Who guards the Guardian?

Before (Jeremy Brier's summary of Emily Thornberry's opinions...)

After (the Guardian's summary of Jeremy Brier's...)

The translator's victory

Once, during work on Calvino's great comic novel If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, a running battle ensued over use of the word 'feedback', which Weaver repeatedly struck out of the typescript, and Calvino repeatedly re-inserted. (In the end, Weaver won: Calvino died before he was able to see the final proofs.)

- Ian Thompson, in his Guardian obit of the legendary William Weaver

Ohyesindeed

Paxman says poets must start engaging with ordinary people

In New York they have a law...

that, in the interests of gender equality, more or less compels every woman to go about topless in summer.

While reading a book.

Dave Eggers does a decent buffalo

and other graphic whimsies.

WOW.

Fiona Roberts ‏@fillefi  1hMy favourite correction EVER (from Guardian) 'The original stated that Bradley Manning took Ellen’s selfie. In fact, it was Bradley Cooper.'

[full credit to Josh Spero for RT]

Utter bollocks

SIMON GARFIELD: I'm not one for writing my emotions down in e-mails, partly because I think it's odd writing on a keyboard, y'know, how much you love someone... I think you still want to send love-letters - that's the reason we don't send condolence e-mails...
CLAIRE ARMITSTEAD: But Hemingway was writing on a typewriter; he didn't write in handwriting.
SIMON GARFIELD: Oh, yeah, but it's still that human connection.

- theguardianpodcasts

The Isherwood section is worse.

In Kafka's footsteps

Of course, one feels sorry for children burdened by their parents with airy-fairy, innuendo-laden or just plain ridiculous names. But I can't help the suspicion that Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii (from New Zealand) perhaps isn't au fait with the overtones of her chosen pseudonym, either.

Stonking

comment appended to Martin Amis' re-review of Ballard's The Drowned World, 50 years on:

jsh23

13 July 2012 10:29AM

Brilliant book, and quite remarkable for a first novel.

I don't really have anything to add to Martin Amis' article!

Oh, for fuck's sake!

Who, even on a mere blog, could manage to write this without realising that the caption is obviously 'Diamonds art forever'?

G'damn...

Please do not take this comment out of context

In which Diane Abbott MP uses the world's most contextless mode of communication to slate whitey before realising the trouble she was in [actually, I think her boss 'realised' it for her], claiming

Tweet taken out of context. Refers to nature of 19th century European colonialism.

and then complaining that the subject matter (and, apparently, irony) was a bit much to cram into 140 characters.

Also, she's missed out a hyphen.

Who'd be a writer?

Another egregious incorrect, this time at the expense of Geoff Dyer, in a newspaper article in which he talks about the life of the writer (without reference to having your prose screwed over by ham-fisted subs).

To wit:

1) In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, rereading Sophie's Choice by William Styron, "trying to see how it worked". To see how Styron got away with it is the more interesting question in my and Martin Amis's view. (Styron's novel was, for Amis, "a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey".) [submitted copy]

2) In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion recalls her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, rereading Sophie's Choice by William Styron, "trying to see how it worked" (Styron's novel was, for him, "a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey".) [edit published]

In fairness, the Guardian editors admit to this shocker at the bottom of the piece (online edition). To their detriment, though, it looks suspiciously like the missing sentence was removed a) in accordance with a widespread editorial hatred of italics, and b) by someone who hasn't heard of Martin Amis.

Slow books, slow irony

Only on the internet (and/or, indeed, on guardian.co.uk) could a panegyric to the Book Barge and the whole concept of independent bookshops come with adverts for ABE Books and The Book Depository as standard.