(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 126

Literary coincidences: 3

I've been tinkering with the idea of launching a small, low-admin South-East London literary festival, so this morning I was making notes as to whom I might be able to involve. Aspiring-writer mates, literary Facebook acquaintances, authors I've interviewed. Anyone from whom I might beg an under-remunerated favour, really, if they happened to be in the area. The last name I put down - on a might-as-well-ask basis - was Wendy Cope.

Out walking the dog just now, I was listening to The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz (psychoanalyst) when, in a chapter about love, a particular bit caught my ear:

As the poet Wendy Cope once told...

Favourite foreign onomatopoeia - 14

Witty window-dressing from the Somerset House Tintin exhibition (til January 30th).

Thomas Crown - in context

From New Cross to Greenwich in one generation, you gotta have the paintings to match.

Day jobs of the poets: Abdullah Husain (novelist)

Abdullah Sahab had an impish sense of humor and a hearty laugh, especially after a drink or two. He knew his whiskey. He famously ran an off license in South London for years before returning to Lahore. When somebody in the audience at the Karachi Literary Festival misunderstood the nature of the operation, asking him whether it was becoming for somebody of his stature to deliver liquor to clients, he responded, "I didn't go to them. They came to me."

- HM Naqvi, in Scroll.in

First... and last?

John Jeremiah Sullivan

on winning a Windham Campbell prize:

Books I've actually finished (again) lately: 59

I read the Iliad a long time ago but I was too young to appreciate it.

- Ludo, aged 11

Books I've actually finished lately: 40

Cock-in-mouth, I'm afraid, is pretty much a condition of existence.

- Randall, or The Painted Grape

How to do it

Blackheath Literary Institution

Books bought

Diagnosis

[Courtesy The Pikey Laureate]

Change ‘Holloway Road’ of North London to ‘Chuck Norris Road’

And other public petitions rightly rejected by 10 Downing St.