An alleged fallacy

I’ve been enjoying Part One (“Ancient Philosophy”) of Anthony Kenny’s four-part New History of Philosophy. The selection and arrangement of themes is pretty tidy, and in one passage – the conclusion of the epistemological chapter – it’s almost breathtaking how the dominoes topple over.

The study of ancient epistemology can teach us much about the nature of knowledge and the limits of scepticism. Several insights became part of the patrimony of all future philosophy: knowledge can only be of what is true; knowledge is only knowledge if it can appeal implicitly or explicitly to some kind of support, whether from experience, reasoning, or some other source; and one who claims knowledge must be resolute, excluding the possibility of being rightly converted, at a later stage, to a different view.

However, ancient epistemology is bedevilled by two different but related fallacies. Both of them are generated by a misunderstanding of the truth that whatever is knowledge must be true. One of the fallacies haunts classical epistemology, up to the time of Aristotle; the other fallacy haunts Hellenistic and imperial epistemology.

The first fallacy is this. “Whatever is knowledge must be true” may be interpreted in two ways:

(1) Necessarily, if p is known, p is true

or

(2) If p is known, p is necessarily true.

(1) is true but (2) is false. It is a necessary truth that if I know you are sitting down, then you are sitting down; but if I know you are sitting down it is not a necessary truth that you are sitting down; you may get up at any moment. Plato and Aristotle, over and over again, seem to regard (2) as indistinguishable from (1). Given the necessary connection between knowledge and truth, they seem to think, only what is necessary can be known. From the acceptance of (2) there flows the construction of the theory of eternal and immutable Ideas, and there flows the impossible ideal of Aristotelian science.

If whatever is knowledge must be true, then it may seem that knowledge must be the exercise of a faculty that cannot err. This is the form that the fallacy takes in Hellenistic times. The Epicureans and Stoics, unlike Plato and Aristotle, are prepared to countenance knowledge not just of eternal truths, but of mundane contingencies such as that Dion is now walking. But this, they claim, is possible only if we have faculties – whether sense or reason – that are capable of infallible operation. The Hellenistic fallacy is just the mirror image of the classical fallacy. Let F stand for some faculty. Then it is true that

It is impossible, if F knows that p, that F has gone wrong.

But that is not the same as, nor is it true that,

If F knows that p, then it was impossible for F to go wrong.

The epistemological fallacy, both in its classical and in its Hellenistic form, would cast long shadows through philosophy’s history.

If Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, the Stoics, and (presumably, for centuries) their descendents all really were confused on this point, then: Oof.

I raise my sons

Little Abel has been feverish; his napping has been so fitful, he hasn’t remained asleep when I’ve tried to separate my body from his. Today he was less ill but just as unwilling to be parted from me. The household chores have suffered; my reading and writing “projects” have suffered; Abel’s napping “schedule,” insofar as one exists, has suffered. In the afternoons, I’ve had to haul him, at his groggiest, down the block to retrieve Samuel from the bus.

Samuel has brought home a workbook of optional math exercises. Most days, I force him to complete a few pages. He screams bloody murder but then settles down and does them easily enough.

Daniel, the middle child, finds ways to claim attention. He and I discuss the English and Spanish alphabets. He firmly believes in che, elle, and erre, although the Real Academia Española disavowed those letters in the mid-1990s. Alas, Daniel follows YouTube, not his father. His Spanish is therefore overcomplicated. His approach to reading in either language is downright glacial. He can sound out syllables but has to pause to lecture me about every letter. I tell him it’s no way to form words, let alone whole sentences. What would really suit him is a language of pictographs and ideographs. His calligraphy is rather good; he might learn to design type before he can read it.

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Most days, Abel and Daniel are good friends. They play and bathe together. Daniel has given them superhero bathing names: “Soap Man” and “Bubble Man.” Abel likes to pour water out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor.

When Abel is old enough, I’ll take them all outside and force them to run around the track next to the school down the street. The two younger boys, especially Daniel, already like to run around the shed in our yard. They didn’t like to before, but I persuaded them with reverse psychology or some such trick.

Now that I’m old

Three books by Tim Mulgan, a future-minded philosopher before “longtermism” was in vogue:

(1) Future People: A Moderate Consequentialist Account of Our Obligations to Future Generations (2006)

(2) Ethics for a Broken World: Imagining Philosophy after Catastrophe (2011)

(3) Philosophy for an Ending World (2024)

The trajectory is not encouraging.

About a decade ago, I read and enjoyed several chapters of the middle book, Ethics for a Broken World. I would read that book again. I wish I could teach it to students of the past. I’m less sure about today’s and tomorrow’s students. The book is a series of “lectures” about late-20th- and early-21st-century moral-and-political philosophy, delivered to university students in the (ravaged) future three or four generations hence. Even this bleak scenario now seems naïvely optimistic. It assumes that there will be students in the (ravaged) future.

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E. H. Carr, in What Is History?, says:

The historian belongs not to the past but to the present. Professor Trevor-Roper tells us that the historian “ought to love the past.” This is a dubius injunction. To love the past may easily be an expression of the nostalgic romanticism of old men and old societies, a symptom of loss of faith and interest in the present or future. Cliché for cliché, I should prefer the one about freeing oneself from “the dead hand of the past.” The function of the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present.

Now that I’m an old man of forty-four, not hopeful for the (this-worldly) future or much enjoying or understanding the present – at least as it exists outside my household – the past does seem more lovely. The picturesque past, that is. If this makes me an unfit historian, so be it.

Body-text fonts, pt. 55: Apollo

Shockingly, this is my first exhibition of the great Adrian Frutiger’s work. Behold.

Very nice, but one must tolerate long descenders. Observe the lowercase ps, qs, ys, and, especially, js (“jolly good job”). (The specimen is from a story by Francis Wyndham.)

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The household is watching Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) in installments: our attention spans are not long. The movie is faux-British. Barry Levinson, Chris Columbus, and Steven Spielberg are named in the opening credits.

Holmes and Watson are schoolmates. The school is proto-Hogwarts. There is a very picturesque scene with all the boys dressed for dinner in the Great Hall. The camera lingers over the table at which the Masters are seated. It cherishes their extreme decrepitude.

In other scenes, old men are injected with poisoned darts that cause them to hallucinate and kill themselves. The hallucinations involve the coming to life of chicken dinners, hatstands, and stained-glass windows.

Little Daniel excuses himself during these scenes.

“New America”

The politicians of New Mexico have responded to Trump’s latest proposal.

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Samuel has been complaining about the wasting of his time. E.g., when someone else chooses a video to watch, that person is “wasting my [Samuel’s] time.”

He can be rather sweet about it, however.

“Mom is working [napping, etc.]. She is wasting my time.” He clarifies: “I wish I could to talk to her instead.”

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop:

He had published eight books … beginning with a life of Rimbaud written when he was eighteen, and concluding, at the moment, with Waste of Time, a studiously modest description of some harrowing months among the Patagonian Indians.

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Daniel: “Mommy, I am going to bed, and [the letter] A is going to spend the night with me. Can you carry me and A to bed?”

Aztecs

Two books:

(1) Inga Clendinnen, Aztecs: An Interpretation (1991), reviewed by the Psmiths;

and

(2) Pablo of Texcoco, How to Be Grateful: An Aztec Guide to the Art of Gratitude (2025), reviewed at NDPR.

It was jarring to come across both reviews in the same week. It was like reading about Nazis and then learning that a collection of mid-20th-century Germanic homespun “wisdom” had just been issued by a major university press.

The “Nazi” remark isn’t a cheap exaggeration. Clendinnen’s work unavoidably brings the Holocaust to mind.

Still, the analogy isn’t perfect, especially when it’s applied to the other book. Pablo’s “wisdom” was written down quite a few years after the Spanish conquered the Aztecs. Would we demand that every postwar Germanic writer address the sorrowful legacy of the Nazi period? If not, then perhaps we shouldn’t object when Pablo and his 21st-century expositors choose not to dwell on the same Aztec qualities that Clendinnen describes.

Perhaps the introduction of Christianity into Nahua culture accounts for the surprising gentleness of the “Pablo” book.

Or perhaps not. It’s not unheard of for the same people to manifest brutality and exquisite etiquettical sensitivity.

How does Clendinnen’s work go down these days? Her scholarship is impossible to ignore. I fear that she is becoming unfashionable, however. I see that in the second (2022) edition of The Mexico Reader, the selection from Clendinnen has been considerably shortened.

(The article it is taken from is here.)

“Lake America”

What I want to know is, how will this trade war affect my streaming of Da Vinci’s Inquest?

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Reading:

The Castle (Franz Kafka)

The Castle (Jon Ronson)

The Sandcastle (Iris Murdoch)

Haunted Castles (Ray Russell)

Castle Rackrent (Maria Edgeworth)

The Castle of Otranto (Horace Walpole)

I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

The Man in the High Castle (Philip K. Dick)

We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Shirley Jackson)

I really am reading some of them!

R.I.P. Dolly Parton

… whose music I don’t know well – I confidently recall only her songs “Jolene,” “9 to 5,” and “Islands in the Stream” – but whose generosity I appreciate. My children have received dozens of free books from Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library.

Speaking of libraries: Abel has become almost impossible to supervise in actual ones. He climbs on tables, ravages displays, chews tips off markers, and dumps toy bins upside-down. I follow in his wake, cleaning his messes. Today, while I was picking up toys, he moved through the Spanish-language book section like a tornado, pulling several shelves’ worth of volumes onto the floor.

The library’s rules, unfortunately (or fortunately), do not permit me to reshelve books.

My two least favorite librarians were on duty – the ones who sternly call me “Sir.” They were kind this time.

Yes, it’s good that we receive plenty of books at home, thanks to Dolly Parton.

Body-text fonts, pt. 54: Poliphilus

I used to mistake Poliphilus for Bembo. “Old Bembo” is how I thought of it. Of course both are derived from the work of Francesco Griffo.

Poliphilus lacks its own italic but usually is paired with Blado.

This specimen is from Aesop, whose fables I like to read to Samuel on those nights when he’s too tired to stay awake for anything longer.

“A lion and an ass made a partnership and went out to hunt.” (Sometimes a fox joins them.) It’s surprising how many fables begin that way.

It’s surprising, also, how often the lion is not just the strongest but also the wisest character. Aesop has something of a “might makes right” streak in him.

I literally wrote this blog entry in my sleep.

“The jellyfish that has cracked the secret to immortality”

From the Guardian:

[Turritopsis dohrnii] “is unique,” [says marine biologist Maria Pia Miglietta,] “because when faced with unfavourable conditions – and I mean high temperature, physical cutting, starvation, chemicals in the water, you name it – when you try to kill the jellyfish, it doesn’t die.”

Most normal jellyfish start off life as larvae. They metamorphose into polyps (tiny, stationary soft bodies) that bud off swimming medusas, which grow up to become adult jellies. Eventually, after reproducing, most will stop swimming, crumble a little and then die.

But the immortal jellyfish escapes that fate. It reverts to a juvenile form, and starts its life cycle again.

The process is called “cellular transdifferentiation,” Miglietta says. The jellyfish looks like it’s dying and sinks to the bottom. Then – like a butterfly returning to a caterpillar – it shrinks into a ball, and within 24 to 48 hours, buds off a new polyp with the same identical genome, she says. …

In the lab, where Miglietta studies them, these jellies can theoretically live for ever. However, for some in the wild, getting eaten may eventually end that dream run.

(My italics.)

Some more quotes:

James Lenman (“On Becoming Extinct,” p. 254):

The Second Law of Thermodynamics will get us in the end in the fantastically unlikely event that nothing else does first.

Peter van Inwagen (“The Possibility of Resurrection,” p. 121):

Perhaps at the moment of each man’s death, God removes his corpse and replaces it with a simulacrum which is what is burned or rots. Or perhaps God is not quite so wholesale as this: perhaps He removes for “safekeeping” only the “core” person – the brain and central nervous system – or even some special part of it.

John 3:3:

Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

And see Lewis’s Mere Christianity – especially its last chapter, “The New Men,” to which everything in the book conduces.

Body-text fonts, pt. 53: Equity

… which is Matthew Butterick’s update of the classic Ehrhardt typeface.

Equity (darker version; lighter version) is excellent – and underused. I’ve seen it “out in the wild” only in books by Butterick or by his enthusiasts: e.g., in Bryan A. Garner’s Legal Writing in Plain English.

(Of course, Ehrhardt already is good enough for most uses. Perhaps Equity is superfluous.)

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Equity is this month’s featured font because private equity is in the soccer news. Infantino is trying to make room for investors – Trump associates! – to buy a substantial share in FIFA’s tournaments.

Some FIFA member nations expect to benefit from the deal. Others – those that have no trouble paying for their soccer operations – staunchly oppose ceding business control to outsiders.

The European nations have resolved, unanimously, to boycott all FIFA competitions unless Infantino’s proposal is withdrawn or voted down.

I hope they get their way – without the boycott. I am not taken with Europe’s “principles.” Europe has a long history of thinking itself too good to play with anybody else.

Tim Vickery, in this video, explains:

Vickery’s diagnosis and proposal are very nearly my own, and so I’ll leave the matter there. But this is not to treat it lightly. The World Cup’s continuance is in danger.

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

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P.S. Tens of thousands of Moroccans illegally crossed into the tiny Spanish semi-exclave of Ceuta yesterday. Spain and Morocco, along with four other countries, are slated to host the 2030 World Cup together.

1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 99: The castle

(Not based on Kafka’s novel.)

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Seldom viewed outside of Australia, The Castle (1997) is revered in that country. Wikipedia tells us that this movie

can be seen as a social study [of] the lives and aspirations of the inhabitants of suburban Australia. The central character, Darryl Kerrigan, ties into the stereotypical depiction of an “Aussie battler,” a man who will protect and serve his family through bold and sometimes ruthless assertion.

I’ve not observed Australians in their natural habitat. Doubtless, there’s much about this movie that I don’t understand.

Even so, I love The Castle.

One begins by snickering at the protagonists – Greater Melburnians pursuing the Australian Dream in their dismal, airport-adjacent cul-de-sac. But in the end, one is touched by these people. One wishes they were one’s neighbors.

(It’s gratifying when one well-heeled outsider – a broadminded constitutional lawyer, played by the grave but twinkling Charles “Bud” Tingwell – is admitted into their circle.)

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Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton), patriarch and hero, is lovable because there is so much that he loves: his family, his dogs, his tchotchkes, his boat, his garden, his pre-fab country house on a nondescript lake, and of course his family’s suburban home (his “castle”). Not to mention his neighbors and his lawyers. Having thrown in his lot with X, Darryl loves X proudly and unconditionally. We hear him declare, in a wedding speech, his family’s love for the new son-in-law; and what goes for that adoptee goes for every animal, vegetable, and mineral that Darryl claims as his own (or as his own’s own). It doesn’t matter that Darryl’s wife and children are pitifully ordinary, or that one son – in what I believe to be a reference to Australia’s colonial origin – is in prison. Darryl treats each family member with something approaching veneration. And each of them responds in kind.

Darryl is not a rich man. He earns his living towing cars (i.e., clearing away others’ property). His boat, house, house-extensions, holiday house, and dogs – purebred racing Greyhounds – have been accumulated opportunistically. The Kerrigans scour the trade papers for bargains. Once acquired, each purchase is accorded quasi-heraldic status. Non-purchases too: witness how the household acquires its front gates.

The Kerrigans are consummate appropriators. It is a sly irony. The movie recounts their struggle against appropriation by outsiders.

One day, the Kerrigans receive notice that their house is to be compulsorily acquired by the airport, so that the runway might be extended. The Kerrigans and their neighbors oppose this order in the courts. But their lawyer is out of his depth, and the airport is backed by powerful business interests.

“I’m starting to understand how the Aborigines feel,” mutters Darryl.

(It’s a sign of comedic deftness that this low-key political statement produces one of the movie’s biggest laughs.)

It isn’t hard to guess that the Kerrigans’ misfortunes will be reversed. In time, the lawsuit is heard by Australia’s highest court. The judgment favors the Kerrigans, and the “castle”-dwellers end up better off than before. The legal aspect of the story is, I suspect, sheer fantasy. The movie’s really interesting questions aren’t about law; they’re about value. There are questions about ownership and appropriation, and there are aesthetic questions. Can a life of utter tastelessness be good? How important is the aesthetic component, comparatively speaking?

Proverbs 15:17 says: “Better a vegetable dinner with love than a stall-fattened ox with hate.” The movie illustrates this principle.

For it leaves us in no doubt that the Kerrigans’ aesthetic capacity is very, very poor. Indeed, it’s their utter non-descrimination, their determination to embrace absolutely every piece of kitsch, that enables them to love each other as they do. This is made clear from the beginning, in brilliant faux-naïf voiceover, by Darryl’s youngest son, Dale (Stephen Curry):

I believe the movie is responding to a particular book – a classic Australian work of architectural and social criticism – The Australian Ugliness (1960), by Robin Boyd. (See the book’s Wikipedia article, and its Text Classics webpage.) Images of jet planes, electrical wires, and large TV antennae feature prominently in both works. It can’t just be a coincidence.

Some day, I’ll read the book, and then I’ll understand The Castle better. As funny, touching, and socially observant as it is, it’s an “ideas” movie, really.

Body-text fonts, pt. 51: De Vinne

Our ten-year anniversary festivities continue. On the day itself – Thursday – we took Daniel and Abel to the beach; Samuel was in school, but Karin’s mom joined us. Then, today, Karin & I left all three children with Karin’s dad and traveled to Niles. We watched The Sheep Detectives and ate cheap hot dogs at the cinema, strolled through the park, bought books and fancy candy, and dined on pizza. It was very “us.”

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Penguin typeset a 1988 edition of The Virginian (1902) in De Vinne, a font from the late nineteenth century …

… only to re-set and reissue the book in Stempel Garamond, a little later. I guess the initial nod to quaintness was regretted.

Time was, this book was taught in schools.

Cat people

My 2025–2026 reading cycle has ended. On the last day, I finished reading six books. I came up three books short. (The final tally was fifty-seven.)

I thank Karin for her tolerance.

I caught Samuel trying to put one of my books on its shelf. He couldn’t slide it into the space; he was jamming it in. I stopped him before he could wrinkle the cover.

He’d brought the book downstairs from his play-room.

“Why did you take my book upstairs?” I asked.

He said: “I just wanted to copy out some of the text.”

I didn’t object to that answer. Indeed, I was rather pleased.

We have a new cat in our house: a young “queen” that Karin rescued from a gang of “toms.” We’re keeping her in our bathroom. The plan is to get her spayed ASAP; we’ll then consider whether to give her up or keep her. She’s starved but friendly, a year or so old. She may be the offspring of the winsome, irresponsible cat that lives across the street.

The “toms” have been prowling outside our house all day. I just saw them have their way with another “queen.” One can’t save them all.

Jasper and Ziva are none too pleased, perhaps because a new cat is in the house, perhaps because Karin medicated all three cats against fleas.

Glorious mysteries

We attended a funeral for J., Karin’s kindly old colleague.

“J. and I used to talk hockey,” said the priest. “Sometimes joyfully, sometimes with a little griping.”

That was about it for reminiscing about J. (Reminiscing is done at the wake, apparently.) The priest and mourners then prayed the Glorious Mysteries, in which are included:

• one Apostle’s Creed
• six Our Fathers
• six Glory Bes
• five Oh My Jesuses
• fifty-three Hail Marys
• other formulae

My heart sank around the thirtieth Hail Mary. Was the priest shooting for one hundred? Mercifully, no.

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I finished reading the Adrian Mole series. It gave me much pleasure.

I’ve begun reading The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. It features Miss Jane Marple and is set in the classic murder-village of St. Mary Mead. When I finish, I’ll’ve read all sixty-six of Dame Agatha’s crime novels.

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Daniel, somehow, is learning to speak in French.

Bonjour, Daddy, he grins. Ça va.

Not bad for not having been taught. And his accent is spot-on.

Canadiana

The dandelions have returned. Fewer lawns are infested this year. Ours is one.

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More reading:

• Agatha Christie, Death Comes as the End (her novel set in *ancient* Egypt)
• Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (supplement to MacIntyre’s book)
• George Grant, Lament for a Nation (see discussion, below)
• Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals (for the group)
• Stefan Zweig, novellas: Burning Secret, A Chess Story, Fear, Confusion, and Journey into the Past (they’re great)

Grant’s 1965 book, summarized here, deserves some comment. What is Canadianness? North American Britishness, is the core of Grant’s answer. That is, Britishness nurtured as a tradition of political distinctiveness from the USA, featuring, e.g., a more serious commitment to federalism, as involving better treatment of and greater autonomy for minorities. Alas, when Britain itself was pulled into the U.S.’s military-economic orbit, Canada was pulled in, too. Canadian businessmen sold out first. Politicians followed. Nuclear weapons were brought to Canadian soil. Canada effectively gave up its nationhood and became a satellite.

(Lately, of course, the pendulum has swung the other way.)

Here is a Canadian’s capsule summary, written two decades ago (scroll down the list to book no. 41):

Well, Canada is still here, but what, pray, is it? Grant wrote this brilliant, deep essay on the question in the early 1960s, in the aftermath of Diefenbaker’s political downfall. He wrote of a small “c” conservative society, respectful of tradition, that was disappearing under the pressure of continentalism. Forty years have passed, but Lament still speaks to us directly of important issues. It is a must-read for anyone interested in what might define a nation called Canada – especially given that the formula of “medicare with peacekeeping” is more glib than inspiring, and factually shaky as well.

Who in the U.S. knows about Prime Minister Diefenbaker? I’d guess less than one tenth of one percent (Canadian expats excepted). So, next month, I’ll read Desmond Morton’s Short History of Canada, which purports to make “acute observations on the Diefenbaker era.”

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Another item of Canadiana: The Peanut Butter Solution (1985). It has music by teenaged Céline Dion. We watched this bizarre movie as a family. I won’t say I didn’t like it – I did! – but it fed my suspicion that our admirable northern neighbors are, in fact, deranged.

Death on the Nile

Once I finish this, I’ll have read every novel by Christie that features Hercule Poirot.

It’s a long book with a large cast and much stage-setting. After almost two hundred pages, no one has been murdered.

But it’s an interesting book. I like it when Christie goes biblical. Overt sermonizing in literature is unfashionable, but Christie can’t help herself. It’s refreshing.

“You are of the Church of England, I presume?”

“Yes.” Linnet looked slightly bewildered.

“Then you have heard portions of the Bible read aloud in church. You have heard of King David and of the rich man who had many flocks and herds and the poor man who had one ewe lamb – and of how the rich man took the poor man’s one ewe lamb. That was something that happened, Madame.”

Linnet sat up. Her eyes flashed angrily.

“I see perfectly what you are driving at, Monsieur Poirot! You think, to put it vulgarly, that I stole my friend’s young man. Looking at the matter sentimentally – which is, I suppose, the way people of your generation cannot help looking at things – that is possibly true. But the real hard truth is different. I don’t deny that Jackie was passionately in love with Simon, but I don’t think you take into account that he may not have been equally devoted to her. … What is he to do? Be heroically noble and marry a woman he does not care for – and thereby probably ruin three lives – for it is doubtful whether he could make Jackie happy under those circumstances? If he were actually married to her when he met me I agree that it might be his duty to stick to her – though I’m not really sure of that. If one person is unhappy the other suffers too. But an engagement is not really binding. If a mistake has been made, then surely it is better to face the fact before it is too late. I admit that it was very hard on Jackie, and I’m very sorry about it – but there it is. It was inevitable.”

“I wonder.”

She stared at him.

“What do you mean?”

“It is very sensible, very logical – all that you say! But it does not explain one thing.”

“What is that?”

“Your own attitude, Madame. … To you this persecution [by Jackie] is intolerable – and why? It can be for one reason only – that you feel a sense of guilt.”

Linnet sprang to her feet.

“How dare you? Really, Monsieur Poirot, this is going too far.”

“But I do dare, Madame! I am going to speak to you quite frankly. I suggest to you that, although you may have endeavoured to gloss over the fact to yourself, you did deliberately set about taking your husband from your friend. … You are beautiful, Madame; you are rich; you are clever; intelligent – and you have charm. You could have exercised that charm or you could have restrained it. You had everything, Madame, that life can offer. Your friend’s life was bound up in one person. You knew that, but, though you hesitated, you did not hold your hand. You stretched it out and, like the rich man in the Bible, you took the poor man’s one ewe lamb.” …

“She threatened to – well – kill us both. Jackie can be rather – Latin sometimes.”

“I see.” Poirot’s tone was grave.

Linnet turned to him appealingly.

“You will act for me?”

“No, Madame.” His tone was firm. “I will not accept a commission from you. I will do what I can in the interests of humanity. That, yes. There is here a situation that is full of difficulty and danger. I will do what I can to clear it up – but I am not very sanguine as to my chance of success.”

Linnet Doyle said slowly: “But you will not act for me?”

“No, Madame,” said Hercule Poirot.

Body-text fonts, pt. 50: Baskerville (metal type, mid-20th c.); Baskerville 10 (digitization)

My favorite Baskerville specimens from the previous century are in Charles Williams’s novels (e.g., War in Heaven [1930]).

This, too, is representative:

Rose Macaulay
The Towers of Trebizond (1956)

From the 2003 NYRB Classics introduction by Jan Morris:

There was a time when the opening line of this book entered the common parlance of educated English and American people. Nearly everyone I knew could quote it, and “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot” became a commonplace of badinage or social pleasantry. The line still gets into dictionaries of quotations, but it is years since I have heard it used in conversation.

It’s too bad that we’ve moved from the gracious “Take my camel, dear” to the boorish “Hold my beer.”

(František Štorm’s Baskerville 10 is the font’s closest digital approximation.)

Peanuts PDFs; UK map; Midwestern wedding

All of the Peanuts strips, PDF format, $25. Offer ends in 12 days.

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My UK wall map – a Christmas gift from my father-in-law – has been framed at last in a heavy, wooden contraption from Goodwill. Karin, the handy one, did the framing. My idea is to hang the map next to the TV so that we can check it when we watch homicidal/​agricultural/​veterinary programs, e.g. our latest, The Highland Vet.

Current reading: François Mauriac, Genetrix; Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the last book in the series). And lots of other books.

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I should describe the wedding we attended on Sunday. Samuel bore the rings with aplomb. The much younger flower girl lagged behind, so Samuel retraced his steps, grabbed some petals, and strewed them for her. All else went according to the script: the brief vowing ceremony; the post-vowing, pre-dining interlude for photos; the popcorn and donut tables; the soda and liquor booths; the dinner rolls, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes; the couple’s dance, the bride’s dance with her father, and the groom’s with his mother; and the Cha-Cha Slide. There was no removal of the garter with teeth – none we stayed for, anyway. When we left, I was dead-tired. I’d held squirmy Abel for several hours. It was as wearying as if I’d spent the day moving house.

Samuel and Daniel loved the Cha-Cha Slide; their grandpa danced it with them. That ex-DJ was in his element. I’ve not met a more ardent ritual-relisher.

Preview: Irish reading

Here is my list of Irish people to read in 2026–2027. (And afterward.)

Who’m I overlooking?

• John Banville, a.k.a. Benjamin Black
• Samuel Beckett
• Elizabeth Bowen
• Anna Burns
• Joyce Cary
• Erskine Childers (Mayfair-born)
• Roddy Doyle
• Maria Edgeworth
• J. G. Farrell
• Tara French
• Seamus Heaney
• James Joyce
• Claire Keegan
• C. S. Lewis
• Brian Moore
• Iris Murdoch
• Edna O’Brien
• Flann O’Brien
• Sally Rooney
• George Bernard Shaw
• Jonathan Swift
• J. M. Synge
• William Trevor
• Oscar Wilde
• Cecil Woodham-Smith (Welsh-born, Irish-sired)
• William Butler Yeats

I’ve read, or at least tried to read, all of these people but Bowen, Cary, Heaney, Edna O’Brien, Synge, and Trevor. I wouldn’t mind trying out everybody on the list.

I’m leaving Franks McCourt and O’Connor off the list. For now.

I also want to read a history book, The Rise and Fall of Christian Ireland. (Woodham-Smith’s Great Famine also is a work of history.)

My mother-in-law also has scheduled various Irish books to read this year. Nothing on her list is on mine.

The idea for this project came from viewing Atom Egoyan’s excellent, unsettling Felicia’s Journey (1999) and reflecting that the source novel’s author, William Trevor, has been pretty well off my radar.