Favourite footnotes: 13

Who is Mr. Dash, the philsopher? Really I have forgot. Not through any fault of my own, but on the motion of some absurd coward having a voice potential at the press, all the names were struck out behind my back in the first edition of the book, thirty-five years ago. I was not consulted, and did not discover the absurd blanks until months afterwards, when I was taunted with them very reasonably by a caustic reviewer.

- Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Wow.

I have just received and read through the 70-odd pages of a publisher's Jan-June 2016 catalogue... and found not a single book that I'd be interested in taking a look at, let alone sitting down and reviewing.

Muddy pastures

Neither the grand Oxford English Dictionary nor the muddy pastures of UrbanDictionary.com yielded up an entry for 'deviltons'.

- Bruce Whiteman, on the selected essays of Michael Hofmann

George Orwell

reviews Mein Kampf - with the usual unfaltering honesty.

[via Oliver Ashford, with thanks]

On derivative non-fiction

the long trails of 'ibids'...

- David Crane reviews The Ariadne Objective in The Spectator

The truth about Mortality

Humdinger comment - second from top - on the New Statesman review of Hitchens' last waltz.