Only in English - 15

'All over it' = situation under control
'All over the place' = situation not in any way under control

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

Consider the retweets

Think Mrs Townsend would've been proud.

'apologia'

Because sometimes people are just wrong – and deserve to have the details spelled out to them.

[via Fionn Napier]

Which side of Paradise!? :s

A reader's dilemma.



[courtesy of Dominic Hilton]

Does anybody else think

that twenty quid is more than can be reasonably expected for a hundred and sixty pages?

Faber, isn't it.

Dave Eggers does a decent buffalo

and other graphic whimsies.

Advice for life

One must be poet enough not to disturb the ceremony, yet the jester must always be lying in ambush.

- Søren Kierkegaard, The Seducer's Diary

Favourite footnotes: 1

Skerry: O, come on, you know that one.

- Basil Bunting, Briggflatts

Books I've actually finished lately: 20

Credo

All old wives' chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound.

- Basil Bunting, 'A Note on Briggflatts'

Books I've actually finished lately: 19

How to write letters

God it has been wonderful country. But you hate country. All right omit description of country.

- Hemingway (to F Scott Fitzgerald)

[with thanks to Mika Tennekoon]

Diagnosis

[Courtesy The Pikey Laureate]

Best pitch EVER!!

Just say yes or no to this: Kafka, Woolf, Hemingway, Chaplin, and Sontag are debating the best movie ever made.

- David Thomson, to the editors of McSweeney's Thirty-One - Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores: old forms, unearthed