(Audio)Books I've actually (re-)finished lately: 123

To be alive as Chaucer was not the same as to be alive as Milton - or Tennyson, or Eliot, or Plath.

- Peter Whitfield

Against my ruins

Two extracts from the Lonely Planet's Sri Lanka: a travel survival kit (3rd ed. 1987; security updates c.1990):

If you like ruins you'll find your fill in the ancient cities of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.

- 'Introduction' [first full page of text]

There are no places of interest unless you are interested in photographing ruins.

- STOP PRESS [last full page of text]

Books I've actually finished lately: 106

At the foot of my stairs, a small boy was spelling out my name on the name-plate. His mother yanked him away impatiently. "Come along," she said. "It's no good reading that. She's been dead for years."

- Olave, Lady Baden-Powell

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 104

Unwittingly or otherwise, the reader here appears to be channelling Alec Guinness...

Touching everything

The species produces people like me, once in a while, to hoard history; so that people like Bunyon can pick at it. I like to touch everything as I go by, only I find it hard to set down afterwards. I write everything, regardless of starts and stops, or rather, consumed by them. I don't think in stories, I think in seas, following wave after wave of curiosity. I lack imagination, or suffer from the surfeit of it; I lack shape, the gift of sudden freezing, that allows one to tinker with the ice.

- Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers

To whomever's in charge of the Sony Xperia dictionary

When I laboriously thumbed out 'counter-offer', that really was what I'd intended. Not 'Counter-Reformation'.

Almost impressive, though...

Books I've actually finished lately: 75

Books I've actually finished lately: 72

Greatest line ever dropped casually into a curriculum vitae

I continued my education as an infantryman in Vietnam.

- Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

The Great Man theory of history

Rorke came to South Africa because of a lack of potatoes in Ireland.

- David Rattray, The Day of the Dead Moon

Books I've actually finished lately: 46

(Editor's note: Also, I have just named my first dog 'Maus', on account of how he looks exactly like the one on the left.)

Note to poets/song-writers

Avoid using brand names in your verses (and/or choruses).

It dates them - in both senses - in the worst cases to before the time of their release.

To wit:

Filmstar, an elegant sir in a Terylene shirt...

- Suede, 'Filmstar'

and some song I heard on Radio1 this morning that referred to 'American Apparel underwear'... (the first 16 words of which were 'hey').

On the people who keep records

Further searches lead only to men of that name from that region detained for debt.

- Lydia Davis, in the TLS

Books I've actually finished lately: 17

NB (to archivists)

What goes on vellum, stays on vellum.

What one looks for in one's Oxford history tutors

Chris Brooke ‏@chrisbrooke

@dsquareddigest @crookedfootball Also the chap who wrote "Isle of Dogs", the only dogging-themed state-of-the-nation novel I've ever read.

Congo Free State

The clue, as ever, is in the name.

Republicans are smart!

'More Americans lost their jobs since the Great Depression...'

- Newt Gingrich waxes historical analysis on the economic record of Barack Obama