Your three best songs?
The ones you have to ration yourself from playing too often in case they might ever spoil?
A man on some crackling radio station was asking that question this morning - just while I tried to park before talking to Australian Broadcasting Co's Bookshow, just as I was preparing to say more about that Princeton conference on the decline of book reviewing.
If the wonderful Ramona Koval had asked me about top songs instead of about the TLS, I would have said:
1) The Needle and the Damage Done: Neil Young: 1971: with a preference, not shared by many, for the 1993 live version on Unplugged.
2) My Funny Valentine: Rodgers and Hart: 1937: forgetting, since songs mean words, the Miles Davis/ Bill Evans version from 1958, I'd choose Rickie Lee Jones from Girl at her Volcano, an EP (remember those?) 1983.
3) Lady Stardust: David Bowie: 1972: again with a preference for the acoustic version added to the resissue of Ziggy Stardust: 1990.
Now, back to the production of this week's TLS.
 Today the TLS has joined Facebook. So has the Editor of the TLS. Neither may seem surprising events to many but it is still something of a new world to me. This blog is now supposed to go automatically onto the new Facebook pages. I will believe it when I see it.
So I am not going to write much now - only enough to report two offerings from the new Rudi Thoemmes rare books catalogue covering the History of Ideas.
The first is a seven-volume edition of Benjamin Franklin's works once owned by the British railway tycoon, Edward Ladd Betts, whose library lasted only a little longer than the date of the 1866 banking crash which brought him low. Yours for £2,600.
The second is Bertrand Russell's The Principle of Mathematics, a classic work, deliberately completed on the very last day of 1900, which the author, being a mathematician, thought of as the last day of the nineteenth century. Yours for the suspiciously round mathematician's sum of £1000.
Franklin, Betts and Russell would all have had one thing in common if they were alive now, a fascination with Facebook, I am sure. The picture would doubtless appeal to them too, chosen, as it is, by tapping TLS and Facebook into Google and printing whatever appears.
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 Last night we celebrated the publication of It's a Don's Life by my dear friend and colleague Mary Beard.
This is no ordinary book - being a collection not only of her TLS blogs known to readers around the world but of the comments to the blogs too
So it was no ordinary party either - being attended not only by the folk one sees regularly (and is regularly pleased to see) at many a white-wine-and-mini-quiche launch but by Commenters who were meeting Mary and each other for the first time outside cyberspace.
So I have now met Lord Truth and various other of the stimulating contributors that make Mary's blog such a pleasure and It's a Don's Life the perfect Christmas gift.
The road from blogosphere to Burlington House was not without a few potholes.
It took me a little while - at least a small gulp of wine and bite of sausage roll - to twig that the man who introduced himself as his lordship was not a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries in whose Piccadilly home the party was being held.
Somehow an on-line Lord Truth can only be a nom-de-keypad but a real-life Lord Truth might easily be one of those peers one doesn't hear from much these days.
I've also now met Alex Drace-Francis, an occasional commenter on this blog too, an authority on Romania who gave me his own latest book, Where to go in Europe, an anthology of toilet literature including items from Anton Chekhov and Rebecca West, another excellent gift (if you can find it) for a relative who has a Don's Life already.
Chekhov, it seems, was an acute observer of ventilations sytems in the latrines of Russian penal colonies. The best, we learn, worked on the 'reverse draft' principle pioneered by a Professor Erisman.
West reported from 'a dark hole in the floor' in Pristina where 'there was someting hieratic in the proportions of the place'.
This was a little more than I needed to know but, fortunately for the happy celebrants last night, the 'necessaries' of the Antiquaries (A D-F is excellent on lavatorial nomenclature) owed nothing to the pleasures of Eastern Europe.
Here was a Society which earned its Royal Charter in 1751, for "the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of the antiquities and history of this and other countries".
This was surely one of its occasions to remember.
Jessa Crispin has come out of post-Princeton seclusion with some characteristically robust reflections about our conference on why so many newspapers are closing their book sections. She does not want us to think that her Berlin-based website is immune from the economic troubles that representatives of the Washington Post and New York Times described so well. But she wonders how much that really matters.
"Bookslut is kept going now on a month to month basis due to advertising issues and the like. For the first time in my life I have had to think thoughts about the "weakness of the dollar." But the reason I have a hard time with these conversations about the decline of the review, and the death of authority, is because so many of the contemporary authors I love are often the ones being kept out of the conversation. They're rarely, if ever, reviewed in the New York Times, they don't get splashy features written about them and their night out with their friends. It's hard for me to get worked up about the decline of reviews when I didn't care much for them to begin with."
She and I are now going to read more of each other's stuff. I've put Bookslut on our media exchange list so that the 'canon according to the TLS' will (or could) be ever close at hand. It still seems strange to me that I can read her choice of what matters without paying anything at all.
There has been a certain amount of other web-chat about this too. In the meantime, may there soon be strong economic models for all, and, before that, a stronger dollar to bring new Euros to her cause.
 Working in a newspaper, it sometimes seemed as though there was nothing but war.
At the TLS we can normally turn our head aside - at least a little way aside.
But this week? No chance.
We have our Berlin Wall issue - why it came down, why no one quite anticipated it and how much any single individual can in decent truth be praised or blamed.
I've also been reviewing the neo-con scholar Donald Kagan's latest thoughts on Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War for the Wall Street Journal.
And I have begun Miranda Carter's triple biography of George V, Wilhelm II and Nicholas II, which asks us to judge which of these mediocre cousins who took Europe into the First World War was most culpable. Philipp Blom is our TLS reviwer of this fine book, excellent for the Christmas list, who sees Nicholas as just about the worst of the three and highly praises Carter’s "insistent gaze into characters that might have sprung from an imagination as merciless as Flaubert’s and as absurd as Gogol’s".
With men like these, what role has there ever been for diplomats?
Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UK ambassador to the UN during the Iraq war of 2003, has been prevented so far from publishing his own book of praise and blame for Blair, Bush and Saddam. In this war edition of the TLS he considers Sir Ivor Roberts’s new edition of Satow’s Diplomatic Practice, a "treasure" for separating the calls of "duty from stupidity" and understanding how matters ought to be handled by men of reason.
The only ninety minutes with any sort of peace came at Sadlers Wells. But even behind Mark Morris's extraordinary new dance work to music by Charles Ives, there were the sinews of soldiers.
Unlike The Guardian's Judith Mackrell, who gives a fine 'five-star' account this morning, I have no form in putting words to the experience of contemporary dance. Often I am bored by it, sometimes very bored. This time I was somehow wide open to the experience. It was like the time I once held a lion cub.
Perhaps it was the way that I had spent rest of the week.
I want to experiment with posts brief enough for Twitter - in case I decide to join Twitter.
So, there is a long piece in The Guardian this morning not quite admitting that it - like very other newspaper - had been horribly hoaxed by a claim that a fossil called Ida was 'the Eighth Wonder of the World' and the 'evolutionary equivalent of the Rosetta Stone'. Readers of the TLS have known for some time that Ida was a lemur unusual only in her high price to a collector and her beautiful preservation. But who can dispute with Sir David Attenborough and the herd instinct on a matter such as this?
OK. I know that even this brief post is too long for Twitter. But I'm sure I can improve.
 At the first night of the Frieze Art Fair I thought it was surely OK to ask about the prices.
It was different at the Venice Biennale earlier this year (see previous posts). I'd discovered there that money-talk was best left to Basel in the following week. The form, it seemed was for buyers to take away their Italian notebooks to do Swiss deals away from the crowds.
But at Matthew Slotover's still innovative Frieze Fair - a fantastical show of international galleries under canvas in Regent's Park - cash-chat would surely be acceptable.
I'd even just met Peter Mandelson, the most powerful man in British politics (so that must include arts politics) and we had idly talked of how much business here was booming - at least in the business of acrylic and oils, mobiles and mini-movies.
I had also just seen my favourite piece of the night (a very suitable present for a TLS editor) a study by the Wilson sisters from Newcastle of the oddments store in Maggs Bros Berkeley Square book shop. A little like the one illustrated here, it showed the back view of a woman in a black and white dress with leather bound copies of Moliere and Voltaire and Sir Rutherford Alcock's classic of Japanese travel The Capital of the Tycoon. All mine, the dealer said, for £23,000. Or was that Euros? Anyway, it had a clearly marked price.
Then I followed a buzz of fashionable beer-by-the-neck drinkers in black suits into a gallery where every BlackBerrying sound was of numbers. Perhaps art criticism can be best expressed in noughts? Certainly there was no other kind I could hear.
 So, how much is this?, I asked. The question was to an immaculately styled young woman (and this was nearly 9 pm after a long day) who stood by a pair of cream over-paintings of some kind of poster. One work was labelled Mumbai After Dark, the other Tijuana After Dark. They looked to me like custard smeared on an advertisement for a film - but to the more knowing, I concede, they may be something quite else. I just wanted to know what they cost.
'Are you a journalist?', she asked in a counter question.
I said 'I am', quite cheerfully. I'm rarely ashamed of being a journalist and it is many years since I even pretended not to be one.
'Then I can't tell you', she said.
I smiled. I was very polite. I did not even need the information. I could not have asked more gently why a journalist could not have the price.
'Because you're not a buyer'.
How did she know? OK my black suit was not probably the sharpest in the tent. I was not holding a bottle of beer (though I would have appreciated one) and I even had a BlackBerry.
'No, I'm not a buyer' - well certainly not for those, I could have added. 'I just want to know what they cost and why everyone but journalists get their questions answered at this gallery'.
After a round or two of this, she sighed . 'OK. They're half a million dollars each - by Richard Prince'.
'Fine and thanks', I said and drifted away towards a beautiful, mournful haunting tapestry-like painting made by Idris Khan from music lines in Mozart's Requiem.
And then to a portrait of a naked Charlotte Rampling with a knife between her teeth and a noughts and crosses game carved in blood betwen her breasts.
And to two chess games played on screens, much more perversely memorable.
Did the woman selling Richard Princes just know somewhere in her head that half a million dollars was a silly price, a sum of money that needed more energy to present and defend than at nine pm she had left?
Perhaps she had been pestered by too many journalists - and one last one was just too tiring.
Anyway, for that price I knew that I could have had twenty oddments by the wonderful Wilson sisters.
 These notes come from among the peppermint-and-toffee walls of Princeton, New Jersey, where editors and academics have gathered to discuss the demise of the book review.
To be precise, I'm writing from the Nassau Inn, a name that goes back to Scott Fitzgerald's debut Jazz Age novel, This Side of Paradise, even though the hotel itself,for all its Ivy League vegetation and chocolate box facade does not.
The faint sense that literary life, like the Inn, is not quite what it was pervades a lengthy debate, led for the editors by the combative Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times Book Review, the only newspaper section exclusively for books that survives now in America.
Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer Prize winning critic and sometime editor of the sometime Washington Post version, is here too with Steve Wasserman, former holder of the same lost titles on the Los Angeles Times. Jessa Crispin, editor and founder of the website, Bookslut, is prepared, she says, to be assaulted for her part in the print men's downfall and pleasantly surprised when she is not.
No one disputes that across America, the space in newspapers for book reviews is down. Wasserman is adamant on that simple fact. he has written on it eloquently before in the Columbia Journalism Review of two years ago. Now matters are worse.
So, whose fault is it?
The book publishers? For printing more and more titles and advertising fewer and fewer of them?
The book writers? For just not being as good or as interesting as in the golden days and not deserving the space now dolloped out so generously to the stars of sport?
The book critics? For not judging and selecting properly or at all? For describing instead of arguing a case, for enthusing with puff rather than endorsing with reasons. Is there too much reviewing and not enough literary criticism?
The World Wide Web? For allowing an infinity of choice while being at the same time averse to anything 'over 260 words' - and preferring when possible not even to pay for those.
The government? By which we mean here the terrible Bush goverment and its part in the economic crash that has led hot breakfasts to be cut at Harvard and all sorts of problems even in Princeton? Fortunately we stay away from the big picture.
This is not much of a day for politics. Obama is the triumphant 'Nobel Peace Prez' in the local Trentonian's newspaper headline. The Democrat governor, Jon Corzine, is catching up on his challenger in the polls, aided by witty advertisements at the expense of the Republican's weighty waist and thighs. In the Nassau Inn's photo gallery of alumni stars, Michelle Robinson Obama (class of '85) has the clear edge on her neighbour, Donald Henry Rumsfeld (class of '54).
We have a good-humoured debate, conducted by our Princeton hosts over a five hour period that is impressive in itself, ranging over the general joy in books that Dirda so powerfully evokes when he speaks, to the nitty-gritty of pay rates, the power of reviews to make a difference (How much exactly did they help Fitzgerald?) and with minimum moaning about any masters higher than newspaper editors and owners.
There are one or two recurring tensions. I expected that the audience would be grateful that the New York Times had maintained its book section against the odds. Instead, the excellent Sam Tanenhaus had to defend himself strongly for allowing Dan Brown in to his pages and not reviewing enough foreign books.
Why did he not just put more reviews on his website? In patient response Tanenhaus set out with clarity the work of editing and checking that goes into every NYT review and how the cost of paying NYT writers and editors to expand their work along with the medium would be economic madness in the present conditions.
Another issue was whether we should we be 'gate-keepers' for the literary culture that we like, letting in what we considered of quality and worth and excluding what we did not? Jessa Crispin does not want Bookslut to be a gatekeeper or anyone else to be one either. It seemed desirable to me that another word for the principle of gate-keeping might be desirable for the rest of the afternoon. You don't mess with the determined and resourceful Bookslut.
Princetonians appreciate the online possibilities. There is none of the hostility that Jessa Crispin, freshly flown in from Berlin, was expecting. But this is undoubtedly a particularly wonderful place to be the Editor of the TLS. Our readers, writers and appreciators abound. Many thanks to two of them, Anthony Grafton and Nigel Smith, for the idea of the conference and its smooth organisation.
Sam Tanenhaus's vigorous defence of the serious and popular in his coverage - with all the hackles it raises from those who distrust popularity at all - took me back vividly to my days of editing The Times in London. The 'serious and popular' is seriously hard. The TLS, by a contrast that could only be explained here at the acute risk of smugness, can succeed - and does - by offering a mix of exclusively the serious and sometimes difficult to loyal subscibers who prize us precisely and only for doing just that.
Loyal readers paying serious money for literary criticism in a paper which has never been as dependent on advertising as the general press is a winning formula in these days. The World Wide Web, which causes such trouble to newspaper economies, is for us a powerful tool to attract new subscribers in places around the world which we could never reach by mail.
I brought some figures to the meeting, prepared in London by our Managing Editor and writer on contemporary poetry, Robert Potts, assisted, I should say, by some numerate summer interns. The team had taken for analysis a twelve month period to April this year and four other loosely comparative titles, the New York Times section, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books and The Guardian.
These showed that of the 1832 books reviewed by the TLS in this time, 73 per cent were not reviewed by any of the other publications, 20 per cent were reviewed by one other, 5.6 per cent by two, one per cent by three - and that only seven books were reviewed by all five papers. I had not intended to publish these, being no statistician myself and ever nervous of the ill use that such numbers can be put. But one of our hosts was keen that I should - and to hosts as generous as those here it would be ungracious to say no. So there they are.
The small number of books reviewed by all was a surprise. Probably it would benefit from deeper appraisal. Seven shared titles is a strong counter to those who accuse book reviewers of a herd mentality to all review the same things. It would suggest,however, that there may be too little acceptance of a common canon, too little confident gate-keeping. Those newspaper owners and editors who cut back on book coverage might be more impressed if there were greater agreement on what is good.
The lack of reviews of foreign books was keenly felt by the audience - and especially reflected when were on our breaks. I did not have comparative figures here and could not defend anyone else. But the same TLS statisticians had shown me that 229 of our 394 fiction reviews were of books by non-British authors, 65 of them American, 29 French, 14 Spanish, 12 German, 10 Russian and a decent sprinking from Angola, Bosnia, Brazil, Ghan, Tunisia and Vietnam. Almost 40 per cent of our poetry reviews were of books by writers outside Britain This is a very conscious editorial policy at the TLS. I was pleased but not surprised by the numbers. The Princeton audience were both pleased and surprised.
This is not a full report on our debates. Perhaps other bloggers in the audience or the panels will add their own recollections. I await Bookslut on gatekeeping with some trepidation. The afternoon ended with a discussion of whether in future universities like Princeton would fill the publishing gap left by the newspaper press. Many reviewers were academics already (how else could they afford to be reviewers?) and their students were keener these days to review books even as the opportunities in print reduced. And, half way through that thought, with comendable attention to timekeeping, we drifted off to drinks.
A few moments later a woman with a glass of white wine in her hand - in beween enthusiastically praising Obama's Nobel and unenthusiastically endorsing Governor Corzine over his fat Republican opponent - suggested that I buy a copy of Fitzgerald's once notorious Princeton novel while I was here and read it again in the Nassau Inn where some of its parties are set.
It seemed a good way to spend a morning. So I have. And I have just reached a passage where the hero, based on the author, is arguing with a fellow student about literature and the press.
"Look at you; you're on The New Democracy, considered the most brilliant weekly in the country. . . .You represent the critical consciousness of the race. Oh, don't protest. I know the stuff. I used to write book reviews in college; I considered it a rare sport to refer to the latest conscientious to propound a theory or a remedy as "a welcome addition to our light Summer reading". Come on now, admit it."
It looks as though there may be more in this vein to come - in a long and continuing New Jersey conversation.
 How did anyone get to write the first biography of Cicero? Where did Conyers Middleton (see previous post) begin?
One of the guests at the party to launch Robert Harris's novel, Lustrum, last Thursday had been reading our TLS classics issue and hoped for an answer.
It was easy for the questioner to see where Harris might have conducted the research for his excellent novel. Cicero is now one of the best studied Romans of them all. Some guests even hoped that Harris's very political study of Cicero's career (see my TLS review here) might rekindle this aspect of Ciceronian teaching, once the staple of courses in ancient history but now supplanted by Cicero's philosophy, poetry and religion.
But who was Middleton? Had he spent his whole life working up his three-volume best-seller from scratch?
The answer, sadly, is an all too modern-sounding story of plagiarism by a man who loved his Cicero (no doubt about that) but had far too much to do. As religious controversialist, Cambridge librarian and creeper to the great and good, he had not the time to begin at the beginning.
Fortunately there had been a major negelected work of historical scholarship in Latin in the early 17th century by a man named William Bellenden.
Bellenden's De Tribus Luminibus Romanorum, in which Cicero plays the major part, was not only left conveniently unfinished by its author but was published in Paris in 1633 and almost very copy destroyed at sea on its passage back to England.
One hardback survivor was placed in the university library at Cambridge, the perfect place for the librarian Middleton to find it and broadcast its contents to the country in 1741.
By the time that the plagiarism charges against Middleton were laid, they were barely more than literary gossip and no one too much cared.
Anyone who was thrilled - or otherwise - by Peter Mandelson's 'if I can come back, we can come back' performance at the Labour Party Conference this week might be interested in my review of the novel which his friend, Robert Harris, has newly dedicated to him.
After a previous best-seller which described the ghost-writing of a recently retired Prime Minister's memoirs, Harris has returned to treat a parallel theme in ancient Rome. After Blair, Harris is back with Cicero. After Ghost, with its plot of murky Anglo-American dealings in the Bush era, Harris has returned to his fascination with what the death of the Roman republic can teach our own era through the words of Cicero's own ghostwriter, Marcus Tullius Tiro.
The plot of Lustrum covers five years from Cicero's consulship in 63 BC when he triumphs over the state's enemies to the great man's pompous years, spent in obsession with status, expensive houses and wearisome retelling of the past.
Curiously, when Cicero's life was first told to a mass readership in England in the eighteenth century, there was a dedication to the Peter Mandelson of that era as well.
Sometimes journalists suggest to their editor that one of their colleagues - or one of their competitors - is a spy.
The cause could be the kind of stories that the suspected individual writes, the kind of places that he or she wants to go, some sort of intuition, instinct or prejudice.
In my TLS review of Harold Evans's autobiography I referred to an 'earlier age' in which this charge was more often - and probably more jusifiably - laid. My Paper Chase includes a vivid acount of an editor's doubts when his distinguished Middle East corrrespondent was found dead beside a Cairo road.
What did I mean by this 'earlier age'?
There are many cases but, since this is a TLS blog, let us take the great poet and sometime Times Persian correspondent, Basil Bunting.
Bunting of The Times? It does not, I know, sound very likely.
His name does not appear in the official history and The Times is a paper which, from Thackeray to Graham Greene, has much prized its literary sons. Bunting was a very great poet. His most famous piece, Briggflatts, was "the finest long poem to have been produced in England since Four Quartets", according to that other passing figure in Harold Evans's memoir, Cyril Connolly.
If Bunting had been a spy, that would have been just one more addition to his skills. Classical students, even in the 1970s, were encouraged to read his translations ("overdrafts" he called them) from Horace and Lucretius. He was a genius at adapting Latin sense to English rhythms. He was also of refreshingly independent mind. His version of one of Catullus's miniature epics ended, after only 22 bad-tempered lines, with the assertion "and why Catullus bothered to write pages and pages of this drivel mystifies me".
There was also his critical campaigning for the music of Monteverdi, his scholastic love affair with the Lindisfarne gospel illustrations, his writings on Japan and old Persia, and The Spoils, a justly celebrated war poem which wanders from the desert to the dockyards of Rosyth by many strange and magnificent ways.
We cannot be certain who was his main employer in Tehran. His archive file is slim. His first salary was Pounds 350 a year. He had ended the second world war war as a British vice-consul in Isfahan and wrote with an easy subversive authority about the threat from Mohammad Mosaddeq who in 1952 threw him out of the country. Like all correspondents of those days, the reports which he sent back to senior editors were better than the articles those editors chose to publish. There is a fine dry sketch of the Persian Queen Mother who "has always had an itch to interfere in politics". It would be hard to detect either a literary genius at work or a master of espionage.
The most graphic cable concerns his departure. "Bunting arrived Baghdad postexpulsion expersia accompanied wife ettwo yearold daughter. Made difficult journey parcar viaheaviest rainstorm... wife grilled, repeat grilled parpolice attempt force her upgive british nationality but she refused despite threat treat infant daughter as persian national prevent child leaving country cumparent".
This sad story did not have the impact that its author intended. The news editor of The Times had a crisp way with words himself: "we sympathise and regret no other vacancy abroad stop" came the reply from Printing House Square three days later. The expenses department, after a certain amount of carefully minuted discussion, did allow him to keep his office Ford Mercury. And that was the Times career of B. Bunting.
An elegant leading article was penned to protest at the expulsion of our man. But, as the poet wrote in a letter to the Editor after a similar leader on journalists and dictators in 1955: "Sir, you expressed as much indignation three and a half years ago, when your own correspondent was expelled from Tehran, but showed the depths of your concern for the freedom of the press by leaving him to starve."
On his return to Northumbria Bunting did, indeed, have a child Persian bride to support and no means of maintaining his correspondent's pasha style of life. Whether because of hunger, anger or because he was forced to earn his living thereafter as a sub-editor on The Newcastle Daily Journal, he maintained no great love of journalism or The Times. In the third part of Briggflatts he paints a picture of pathetic scavengers wallowing in warm ordure, eating each other's trash and pretending to understand the world. Although the setting is among the soldiers of Alexander, the target is clear.
One of the parasites is named Hastor, a man who stares at the stink around him beneath "dung thickened lashes". According to a new biography of Bunting, this is a joke against Colonel John Astor, the proprietor of The Times. The more likely butt of Bunting's bitter wit is Astor's son Hugh, a fellow foreign correspondent whose paychecks were more secure than the poet's own. According to the archive file, Bunting was still in correspondence with H.Astor in 1953, offering pungent advice on Persian affairs. But by 1965, the successful year of Briggflatts and an almost miraculous rebirth for the Beatles decade, Bunting could repay old slights with impunity.
Why did Bunting join The Times? And why was he forced to leave? He claimed a wartime career in spying for Britain, saying that with his antique literary Persian he could communicate with Bakhtiari tribesmen and keep them from the Nazi embrace. In wartime the journalist spy was more acceptable.
He had a lifelong passion for underage girls and, once he had done the decent thing by marrying one of them, he may have found even the stuffy Fifties Times more tolerant than the Foreign Office. Perhaps he used his journalism to continue his spying or perhaps, as wartime rules were replaced by rules of peace, The Times thought he did and took appropriate evasive action. This secret life became the subject of a biography by the writer, Keith Alldritt, but it mostly remains a secret even now.
Timing is everything in journalism. Sir Harold Evans' memoirs, long in the writing, have been published at a critical time for his successor editors at great newspapers around the world. Publication is at the beginning of October. Robert Harris has already given his acccount in The Sunday Times which has serialised extracts. The Economist addresses key issues too. My own thoughts and memories are in this week's TLS.
 I am chided for my insufficient enthusiam to buy 'The nervous system of the Human Body embracing papers delivered to the Royal Society on the Subject of the Nerves', offered at 40 percent off £400 from the final shop catalogue of Waterfield's in Oxford. See earlier post.
A keen classicist should certainly have Charles Bell's pioneering tome on his eponymous palsy, or so I'm told.
The Mycenaean man whose face became the Mask of Agamemnon may have suffered from the sagging expression that defines the condition.
The man in the famous Metropolitan Museum portrait of a Roman sufferer in the 1st century BC (above) certainly had the one-sided sag, the right eye larger than the left and the flattened right forehead.
Art critics have long been fascinated by Bell's Palsy because it disrupts facial symmetry and highlights how central that symmetry is.
Not all the ancient palsies would have been Bell's. In the foreign wars and civil wars of Rome there were many ways in which a face might end the day with a different alignment from that with which it began.
The Roman portrait is notable, however, as an example of how honest were sculptors in the age of Cicero and Cato before Greek ideals of beauty came to the fore.
Last year I took a tour along the route of the Spartacus slave war (73-71 BC) and wandered among many bat-eared, saw-toothed, sag-lipped sculptures from that time - as well remembering the poetry and histories that shed their light on that strange event.
The result was a mix of history, memoir and diary which is being published in January. The proofs have arrived today and there is a description on the HarperPress website now.
There were a good many books with me on that trip - and many more left behind. But if I were going again, I'd take more studies of ancient disfigurements, even if probably not one which, even after the generous Waterfield's discount, costs £240.
Into the TLS office each day come recommendations from writers and readers about what we should review, who should be the reviewers, what our readers might prefer to the books we have selected and who should never, under any circumstance, be allowed to write for the TLS again.
We welcome them all.
We don't act on them all. In some weeks we might act on none of them. But we are a paper which has traditionally fed from widespread roots rather than preaching any single critical doctrine from the top of our tree.
'Not long ago', writes Bill Carpenter from Minneapolis, 'you had a substantial article on translations of the Indian epics. As worthy an undertaking as those translations represent, I suspect that many of your readers would gain more satisfaction from the “transcreations” of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata by the Indian scholar, Dr. Purushottama Lal.'
We did indeed have an excellent piece on the publishing series that aims to be the Loeb Classical Library of Asia. It was our 'lead piece' and many readers thanked us for it.
Bill Carpenter suggests that the work of Dr Lal would do us all even more good. 'He is an excellent Indian English poet who knows how to select from the originals to make effective and readable English poems. Not only that, in his eighties, he is still giving weekly readings of his full-length transcreation (still in progress) of the Mahabharata. Not only that, but his publications, with their hand-woven cloth bindings, are a very good bargain—except for the shipping costs from India. Learn more about his remarkable “Writers Workshop” enterprise in Calcutta, which publishes his transcreations, on this website'.
Sometimes we get recommendations from those who have a commercial or personal interest in what they recommend - and, if that is declared, we mind that not at all. Publishers must sell their wares - and if a brother or sister or former tutor can help, why not, as long as we know who they are.
Sometimes, indeed very often at the TLS, an editor sniffs a genuinely independent suggestion. And Mr Carpenter's seems to be one of those.
Only the most cynical (and at the TLS we try not to merit that description) would asssume that a distinguished corporate lawyer from the Minnesota Bar, specialising in company mergers, real-estate and anti-trust issues, had anything other than the finest motives for introducing us to Dr Lal.
So, thanks to Bill Carpenter. And thanks, by proxy, to all the thousands of others who give us the benefit of their best advice.
Next time I need to consider the Mahabharata, I know where I will be looking.
For as long as I've been a book collector - for almost exactly as long - there has been a Waterfield's book shop in Oxford.
In th early eighties my becoming a collector and their being a seller of books were closely connected.
But this month is the shop's last.
'Valediction' is the name of the current catalogue and 40 per cent discount is the offer on stock.
I could be tempted perhaps by Conyers Middleton's A Letter from Rome (1742), showing 'an exact conformity between Popery and Paganism'. A classic from a great popularising classicist in his day, only £100, thus £60 in this final clearance.
Or Defoe's Jure Divino: a satyr, 1706, 'an unauthorised edition published the day before the authorised folio edition' an act of intellectual property crime as we might now see it, one which resulted in some 'irregular pagination'. But only £65 in Valediction, so £39 to a good home.
Or better still, a 1744 edition of Sallust by the inventor of stereotyping, Alexander Ged. The work survived attempts by compositors to produce deliberately poor work to discredit the system. £275 but a £110 reduction has to be a bargain.
I don't want Charles Bell's demonstration of how Bell's palsy works - not even at a price cut by £160.
I'd just like to be able still to drop by at the shop and see so much that I'd also never buy.
It's to be on-line and by post only from now on.
Valediction indeed. And thanks.
I offered to lend a friend a book today.
He refused. Borrowing was too much trouble. Or rather returning borrowed books was too much trouble.
It never did anyone any good, he said.
'Neither borrower nor lender be' was a motto especially appropriate to literature.
I started to protest that one of the greatest poems in English had resulted from a borrowed book - and not a just a book from any lender but from a lender who was a journalist on The Times.
I tried to tell him about the suicide of Thomas Alasager in 1846 but he was already on line to Amazon.
Thomas Massa Alsager was one of those 19th-century newspaper figures whose versatility puts every one of us, his modern successors, to shame. He was a manager, a music critic, a city editor, an advertising salesman and he was also midwife to John Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer.
He lent Keats the book.
It was in 1816 when Keats looked for the first time into a translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey by George Chapman, the Jacobean poet and dramatist.
Chapman's grand barbarism, as has often been recounted, was in shocking contrast to the refined Homeric lines of Alexander Pope, the ``smooth little toys'' on which Keats and his friends had been brought up.
Chapman's Homer lit a beacon for Romantic poetry. So the actual copy of Chapman's Homer, the one which made possible this transforming work for Keats and for English letters, was one of the most important book borrowings of all time.
Alsager's primary Times job was as business manager. He was a clothworker by birth and his colleagues used to ask why dealing in canvas, or ``floorcloth'', as it was known, gave him a right to talk about art as well as counting the cash
But he did write about art, became a close friend of Charles Lamb, learnt to play almost every instrument in the orchestra, and sponsored the first English performance of Beethoven's Mass in D. He also founded The Times's City office and invented revolutionary methods of filing copy from home and foreign parts.
He may have combined art and finance too much. He died in 1846v by slitting his own throat after accusations that he was over-creative with the accounts.
His nerves had previously been ``made of packthread . . . proof against weather, ingratitude, meat-under-done, every weapon of fate'', according to a letter written to one of his other enthusiasms, William Wordsworth. But, as D.E. Wickham wrote in a 1981 essay for the Charles Lamb Society, this strong protective ``impassibility'' deserted him after his disgrace.
Alsager had a miserable end, dying nine days after he had first gashed his wrist and throat. He was 67. It was 30 years since he had provided the 1616 folio of Chapman which, with its ``loud and bold'' voice, launched Keats into the most creative phase of his life and inspired millions to see what is stunning and new in the world around them.
That was still an era when, except for book collectors, those amateurs who stood astride the worlds of finance and art, there could often be no access to texts. Alsager's folio, as Robert Gittings describes in his 1968 biography of Keats, was even then too valuable to be risked among the thieves' kitchens of Southwark, and had to be read in an all-night session in the safety of Clerkenwell.
``Much have I travell'd in the Realms of Gold . . .'', wrote Keats on his return home, and the rest is literary history. As soon as he had looked into Chapman's Homer, he had a new language, a new confidence to look out into the countryside of his mind.
"Then felt I like some Watcher of the Skies
When a new Planet swims into his Ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with Eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific and all his Men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a Peak in Darien."
Of course, as critics have never ceased to point out, Keats made a mistake in his rapid, bleary-eyed composition after a hard Clerkenwell night. The Pacific was not discovered by Cortez but by Balboa.
We can be sure that Alsager would have been understanding of this: his was a life, like that of all journalists in which vital accuracy did sometimes have to be sacrificed to speed.
And if any one has lent a book to better effect, I can't think of it now.
 In prisoner-of-war camps or places where terrorists' hostages are held, a page or two of old newspaper is the greatest treasure.
I'm not in quite that state today. But the broadband is down, the newsagent is far away and the radio ruminates about the Lockerbie bomber without telling me anything that I don't know.
So I am reading old Times columns about the English language written by the ever gently erudite Ben Macintyre.
Bloomsbury publishers have just reissued the best of them. So, I'm not shuffling yellow newsprint here.
In The Last Word, Tales from the Tip of the Mother Tongue, I'm reminding myself who or what was Humpty Dumpty and whether Mary, Mary Quite Contrary was originally Mary Tudor (with a garden of bells and shells and other torture implements) or Mary Stuart (with an adoring entourage of little maids all in a row).
TLS readers have been following the legal battle over whether J.D California can publish a sequel in the US to Catcher in the Rye. Not at the moment it seems, though I can't see that decision lasting long.
Macintyre reminds me that the killer of John Lennon, and assorted other would-be big-league assassins, thought that they were living the life of Salinger's hero - and lightly speculates over not just a writer's ownership of a character but his responsibility for what is done in that character's name.
I've twice already used the word 'remind'. The comfort of this kind of article is that it does make you think you knew its content already and just needed to be prodded softly into recollection. Even first-time-around in the newspaper they were calming.
In fact, I may not have known the answers - to the origin of 'portmanteau words' or to the question of whether 'pomegranate' rhymes with 'immigrant' in Australian and can explain the origins of 'whinging Poms'. Not so whinging at the val cricket ground today, my dear Australian friends.
I might have known that a handbook of how to enslave women called The Chronicles of Gor was cult sixties fictional sucess - and that a Darlington butcher had recently refused to serve a cult adherent who took his slave on a chain to help him buy bacon. But then I might easily not have known that.
Humpty Dumpty? That story of the civil war cannon which fell off a Colchester wall? Too good to be true if one were applying TLS principles. But heck. It's a Sunday morning. The effortlessness of Macintyre's prose guarantess that a little reminding is all that's needed for hours of pleasure. The Ashes are heading home. Even the broadband is back up. So I can post this note.
 In 1542 England and China were both ruled by paranoid, murderous tyrants with all the usual anxieties about sex, health and the legitimacy of their regimes.
But in any contest over who could kill the most sexual partners, Henry VIII would have fallen far behind the Emperor Jiajing.
While Henry obsessed about the health of his male heir, Jiajing thought that his own eternal health and youth was much the higher priority.
To that end he had a policy of carving body parts out of his concubines and mixing the results with other wholesome drugs from the distant parts of his empire.
In the year that Henry was merely executing Catherine Howard, the women of the Chinese court decided that enough royal scalpeling was enough.
The harem heroines made a fight for freedom, attempting to strangle their lord and master with hair ribbons.
The revolt was not, however, a success. Concubine-training had not demanded sufficient attention to slip-knots.
After executing all his bedroom plotters, Jiajing's general lifestyle continued to serve him rather well. He ruled for 46 years, eight more than even Henry managed.
He had a much bolder approach to legitimacy issues than the Tudors. He was not the son of the previous Emperor but, rather than have himself adopted into the direct line of succession, he declared that his own father had, in fact, been the Emperor all along.
The homelife of Jiajing's living pharmacies forms a chilling chapter in Susan Barker's forthcoming novel, The Beijing Taxi Driver, published in the latest issue of the excellent Pen Pusher Magazine.
My best friend in Connecticut has a passionate concern for animal welfare which is normally directed at the abuse of elephants in circuses.
She has, however, briefly lowered her sights to smaller creatures of the kind that are of greater concern to me.
So, thanks to her, I now know a little more about the fighting finches and canaries of her state (see previous posts) and can answer all questions about how the police could tell that the little birds were fighters and how the gamblers got their subjects to do their pecking.
Some of the saffron finches seized by police had sharpened beaks, it is claimed. At least one beak had a sharp metal object attached. That seems suspicious.
The search of the house in Shelton also revealed superglue, antibiotics, skin and blood supplements, a miniature digital scale and powders that are still being tested.
Were these to treat the injured birds or to increase their stamina to fight? No one is quite sure.
Since only one bird had the sharp piece of metal attached to its beak, there is maybe an extreme-sport version of canary fighting, a grande finale after a night of mere drug-induced pecks. Or maybe it was a living tin-opener.
In addition to alcohol and illegal weaponry, sex was deployed. Female canaries perched in a separate pen above the fighting cage were used to incite the males. Acotrding to the owner of the house, 42-year-old Jurames Goulart, all the birds were kept for singing. Either way, it seems, an avian Vegas,
Police said that they made the arrests on July 26 just as spectators had placed bets and were getting ready to watch the birds fight at the home. Authorities say they seized $8,000 in alleged betting money.The 19 people charged were all originally from Brazil.
Perhaps we have to turn for further answers to Rio readers.
How do Connecticans make canaries fight?
Royson comments on my Cape Cod vacation post that a tot of alcohol will do the trick.
A drink makes the bird a little liverish and late-on-friday-night-feeling it seems.
Alternatively, show them Tweety cartoons on a continuous loop until they go berserk?
That is one suggestion from Connecticut Bob and his commenters, folk who are properly upset by the ill repute that the prize-fighting canary ring has brought upon their great state.
(Lest we get too sanctimonious about this, my learned friend Paul Blezard reminds us that it was long common to take canaries down our coal mines. When the cage-bird could no longer sing to the Maya Angelou tune, it was time to get out.)
Perhaps a real pet cat could help boost the avian fighting spirit. Or sing “Eye of the Tiger” to the little feathered pugilist?
Teach your bird to bob along with “Hair of the Dog”?
The illegal gambling ring - with birds and cash already for a good Connecticut night in - was actually discovered by police near Shelton's Dogwood Road.
176 Ripton, if you're thinking of a sightsee.
But who cares? One pet is much like another in cage-bird-fighting country.
Roosters make too much noise.
Dogs are too expensive.
Cheetah-wrestling? Fox-boxing?
Imaginative leaps too far?
And bears haven't been freely available in Hartford for some while.
I wonder if the Renaissance Italians, the men who pioneered the breeding of pet canaries, ever thought of a flutter on a 'green vs yellow' match.
According to the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, the 'green' would normally be the better bet, being 'more robust' and closer to their cousins in the wild.
There is also a tip here for breeders. Put a male with five females and he always prefers the one he had sex with first.
But if you're looking for future champions, choose the eggs from his later conquests.
Gaol-birds, please note.
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