Jonathan Law

Well I've finally got round to making a s@bst@ck (link in bio). First up, my piece on Christopher Neve's extraordinary book of art criticism Unquiet Landscape -- from last winter's @FoxedQuarterly

@anthony_mcgowan I remember a vicar once telling me, 'If you fancy a big funeral, don't leave it too long'.

I had a half-nap this afternoon, and woke up with this sentence in may head: 'If you live long enough, all your mourners will be young.' Don't know if it's profundity or nonsense.

@not_so_gratian There are always banks of flaring candles and the priest walks about idly tidying hymn/prayer books as if he had nothing better to do.

Priests in movies just hang out in empty churches, waiting to give cryptic-but-sage spiritual advice to protagonists in their moment of crisis between the second and third act of the movie/show.

@HimChatt @nguyenhdi Yes. Congreve spent almost the whole of his youth in Ireland but was born in Yorkshire and seems to have been wholly English by descent.

@JonathanRLaw @nguyenhdi I love Sheridan, unless you count him as Irish rather than English. Shaw was definitely Irish (and most of his best works were written before he started spouting his untenable politics). Synge, O'Casey, Beckett ... They're all Irish, aren't they?

#BookTwitter, what do you think about William Congreve? What are your favourite plays of his?

@nguyenhdi I'd say he has a claim. Who else is there? I think I would put him above any of Shakespeare's contemporaries.

@JonathanRLaw The best after Shakespeare??

@WomackPhilip @guardian It's an extract from a book, apparently.

Why is @guardian using ChatGPT to write its articles? theguardian.com/world/2026/jul…

I’ve never understood why police detectives carry out extensive enquiries and highly detailed forensic investigations when they could just ask everyone on Twitter instead.

Ok. I can’t believe this just happened. My kid is sitting in a beach chair with his hand casually in the sand, & suddenly goes “oh my god look.” He pulls up a girls wedding band. It says “April 16, 2016 I love you.” This was gone FOREVER until now. Seagrove, Fla…Find this lady!

@BretVDB I didn't know that: but she is excellent on Blake, Shelley, Tennyson.

A major critic and the dedicatee of A.S. Byatt’s Possession.

@BretVDB There's a very good chapter in Isobel Armstrong's Language as Living Form and I think she wrote about him elsewhere (but essays rather than a book).

What’s the best book on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry/poetics?

@CapelLofft Today I picked up a book by a famous publisher which referred to a certain singer having been an ‘alter boy’ — ON THE COVER

We all make mistakes, but how does a major press let a book be published in this state? It really undermines one's confidence in the whole tome and makes it a very dispiriting read. I wonder if this reflects a wider collapse in standards or is a one off

I just read a book published by a major university press that is full of absolute howlers, including a reference to Neville Chamberlain being Colonial Secretary between 1929 and 1931 (!?). I wonder whether any editor or reader ever actually read it before it was published

@nguyenhdi youtube.com/shorts/Tjqgs4J…

A neighbour said my fingers were weird?? Pls tell me I have nice feminine hands.

My son left his iPhone in a cab this morning: - 2.30am - Farringdon to near St Albans - £130 He goes on holiday tomorrow and is desperate to get it back. Please DM and retweet Thanks

@John_Barach I have slowly come to the view that Detectorists and Derry Girls are in fact the greatest British sitcoms of all time (if Derry Girls is British). Small Prophets is definitely more of a 'comedy drama'.

@JonathanRLaw I loved Detectorists, though I wouldn't exactly call it a sitcom. Also loved Small Prophets, which is even less of a sitcom.

Saw someone refer to "sitcoms" today and I wondered: Are sitcoms still popular? All the ones I can think of offhand ended years ago. I suspect that Big Bang Theory (end 2019) was the last big sitcom. Young Sheldon (end 2024) attracted fewer viewers. Any popular ones today?

@Lord_Steerforth @zmkc @hairygit Rudge is probably Dickens's strangest novel and well worth reading for that reason alone. It's one of those books that feel utterly engrossing as you read but at the end you put it down and say, 'Well, what the --- was that all about??'

@zmkc @JonathanRLaw @hairygit It's his second least popular novel, so you're not alone. Barnaby Rudge is the one nobody reads. In my old job at Ottakar's, I had to sift through sales data for the whole company. I remember noticing that over a year, a chain of 133 shops sold just eight copies of Barnaby Rudge.

My only response to the heatwave is to read this. I don't know why, but it feels instinctively right.

Small dose of joy.

David Bentley Hart on the oft-neglected semicolon 👇 "A writer who disdains the semicolon is a fool. In fact, hostility to this most delicate and lyrical of punctuation marks is a sure sign of a deformed soul and a savage sensibility. Conscious life is not a brute concatenation of discrete units of experience; it is often fluid, resistant to strict divisions and impermeable partitions, punctuated by moments of transition that are neither exactly terminal nor exactly continuous in character. Meaning, moreover, is often held together by elusive connections, ambiguous shifts of reference, mysterious coherences. And art should use whatever instruments it has at its disposal to express these ambiguous eventualities and perplexing alternations. To master the semicolon is to master prose. To master the semicolon is to master language's miraculous capacity for capturing the shape of reality."

@Lord_Steerforth @hairygit Yes, that was excellent -- Keith Allen as the villain (Jonas). Sadly doesn't seem to be on DVD.

@JonathanRLaw @hairygit I haven't read it yet, but I have fond memories of the 90s BBC television adaptation, with Paul Scofield.

@hairygit @Lord_Steerforth For all its flaws, Martin Chuzzlewit is a great favourite: is there a funnier book in English?

@JonathanRLaw @Lord_Steerforth I love the freewheeling, improvisatory nature of his earlier novels. I can think of little that is as delightful as Pickwick Papers.