Keith Miller

Ladies, if he: -Stays up late making complex wireframe drawings of 3-dimensional toric forms -Leaves little or no extant work apart from damaged Deluge fresco and St George predella -Has no mistress but this sweet perspective He's not your man, he's Paolo Uccello (1397-1475).

@jembloomfield @MinooFramroze I think the alert viewer was supposed to see markers if debauchery in the furniture, choice of sheet music etc

@funesdamemorius @MinooFramroze Really? That's amazing!

"...impropriety of an unremembered, Victorian kind" - the splendid description of Mrs. Erdleigh in "A Question of Upbringing". I can think of two other novels which mention St John's Wood as where gentlemen's mistresses lived - it obviously had something of a reputation!

@MinooFramroze Point taken (& Im not wild about bandying the word hipster around, especially now) but I maintain that a product tasting a bit like shrimp paste but with a Latin name, chiefly available at places like Fortnums, was bound to instil cognitive dissonance in eg the vittles readership

This is a good point but I think it’s only half right. Hipsters both transmute & preserve ye olde worlde. See eg what they’ve done to what’s now the Hawthorn on Uxbridge Rd

@MinooFramroze @jembloomfield I was at college with his (?) nephew in the 1980s and they lived on Carlton Hill in a tall thin house (to match the physique of the men of the family) so maybe the same place?

@funesdamemorius @jembloomfield And Sir SR had his Lond pad there postwar !

I welcome all attempts to preserve this delicious condiment but I fear its almost movingly unhip branding repelled the very people who might have saved it - the umami-signalling hipster community

And the bookchat keeps coming: here's my review of Jeremy Cooper's Discord for @TheTLS the-tls.com/literature/fic…

To my delight I’m off the bench and back in the game over at the Literary Review, trying to hold the fugitive brilliance of D Levy circling warily round G Stein up to the light… literaryreview.co.uk/a-hard-act-to-… via @Lit_Review

Somewhat perverse given the rank egotism that has characterised our trade for three centuries

ngl this sounds inviting

(and yes ok ok it says fire but I'm not sure that dstnction had much weight in 1893 plus glowing bars is a v poor description of what logs in a fireplace look like, though ofc it does rhyme with stars)

I love the fact that 'glowing bars' probably = the vents in a stove but sounds like an electric fire, wch wasn't invented yet but might be by the time Maud Gonne or whoever it is reached a grey/sleepful age - cf the stage direction 'an evening in the future' in Krapp's Last Tape.

Timely reminder of when this guy reviewed that guy... Iggy Pop on Gibbon's Decline and Fall (Classics Ireland, 1995): Caesar Lives by Iggy Pop In 1982, horrified by the meanness, tedium and depravity of my existence as I toured the American South playing rock and roll music and going crazy in public, I purchased an abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Dero Saunders, Penguin). The grandeur of the subject appealed to me, as did the cameo illustration of Edward Gibbon, the author, on the front cover. He looked like a heavy dude. Being in a political business, I had long made a habit of reading biographies of wilful characters — Hitler, Churchill, MacArthur, Brando — with large profiles, and I also enjoyed books on war and political intrigue, as I could relate the action to my own situation in the music business, which is not about music at all, but is a kind of religion-rental. I would read with pleasure around 4 am, with my drugs and whisky in cheap motels, savouring the clash of beliefs, personalities and values, played out on antiquity’s stage by crowds of the vulgar, led by huge archetypal characters. And that was the end of that. Or so I thought. Eleven years later I stood in a dilapidated but elegant room in a rotting mansion in New Orleans, and listened as a piece of music strange to my ears pulled me back to ancient Rome and called forth those ghosts to merge in hilarious, bilious pretence with the Schwartzkopfs, Schwartzeneggers and Sheratons of modern American money and muscle myth. Out of me poured information I had no idea I ever knew, let alone retained, in an extemporaneous soliloquy I called ‘Caesar’. When I listened back, it made me laugh my ass off because it was so true. America is Rome. Of course, why shouldn’t it be? All of Western life and institutions today are traceable to the Romans and their world. We are all Roman children for better or worse. The best part of this experience came after the fact — my wife gave me a beautiful edition in three volumes of the magnificent original unabridged Decline and Fall, and since then the pleasure and profit have been all mine as I enjoy the wonderful language, organization and scope of this masterwork. Here are just some of the ways I benefit: I feel a great comfort and relief knowing that there were others who lived and died and thought and fought so long ago; I feel less tyrannized by the present day. I learn much about the way our society really works, because the system-origins — military, religious, political, colonial, agricultural, financial — are all there to be scrutinized in their infancy. I have gained perspective. The language in which the book is written is rich and complete, as the language of today is not. I find out how little I know. I am inspired by the will and erudition which enabled Gibbon to complete a work of twenty-odd years. The guy stuck with things. I urge anyone who wants life on earth to really come alive for them to enjoy the beautiful ancestral ancient world.

The intro’s on the overripe side and his tune selection is so canonically Gen X as to seeming generic but this is a fantastic i/v by George Shaw, surely the UK’s best male artist atm: thequietus.com/interviews/bak…

@drinkersite Nice to have a buttery white burg with the tuna

So impressed with Rory McIlroy’s wine selection for his Champion’s dinner.

@HenryGJeffreys he once said words to the effect of 'If the IDF had cooler uniforms I'd collect them', somewhat unconvincingly

@funesdamemorius He loved his military history.

More Deighton appreciation from me, why the great spy writer should be a role model for young men - quiet competence rather than shallow flashness. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/1…

A sketch on Nigel Cut My Bills telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/…

Not sure too many of these manosphere lads could rustle up a Veal Chop En Papillotte etc

@eggsbened or indeed make a Low Calorie Lunch for 4 from the Len Deighton Action Cookbook

Len Deighton has died (RIP) so why not listen to the title sequence of Richard Rodney Bennett’s mad Billion Dollar Brain score for 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, tons of percussion incl. xylophone and marimba, Ondes Martenot and 3 grand pianos. youtu.be/efvhQ8kWIEY?si…