Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

...he claims that the curse is telling him to put kerdos (selfish gain) first, death afterwards (kerdos proteron husterou morou).

Poetry babble, as defined by precedent in these columns, is the quote on the back of the book that purports to illuminate the contents, but in practice obscures them. For the Golden Age of poetry babble, you need to go back to 2004 [...] and Ring of Fire by Lisa Jarnot. A typical chunk of verse reads, "ding dong / dug dirt / ditch dub / chimp chore" - in which Alison Cobb found "both Dante's suffering and the Johnny Cash song's self burned away by passion".

When an Arts Council dignitary is reported to believe that Britain is on the brink of producing "the greatest art yet created", instinct tells you that things are in a bad way. When the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport chips in with the view that talk of a "Renaissance" comparable with that in Italy in the fifteenth century is "not an overstatement. It's exactly true", suspicions harden. Never trust a man who distinguishes between truth and "exact" truth.

[Herbert] Spencer and the future George Eliot soon got into the habit of accompanying each other to the opera, or taking the sea air together in Broadstairs. When she complimented him on his clear unwrinkled forehead he attributed it to the fact that he was "never puzzled" being blessed with mental abilities that "did not involve that concentrated effort which is commonly accompanied by wrinkling of the brows". [...] Before long, George Eliot concluded that he suffered from "excess of reason", and announced to her friends that "we have agreed that we are not in love with each other".

A Greek woman who puts on her lipstick to go to the cemetery to tell off the dead. A gay couple who, in scouring the atlas for possible locations for a country cottage, regard Estonia as "a kind of very, very outer London suburb". The Jamaican woman who returns home twice a year to luxuriate in the "real" house she has built there but cannot bear to live in full time. The church organist who keeps every greetings card she has ever been sent, delving for the meanings in every commercial set of verses. The man who says he grieves constantly over the ghosts of the seventy left dead when, as a mercenary, he blew up an arms dump; he seeks consolation in online pornography. The woman in her early twenties who is tattoed and pierced in every conceivable place, and sees pain as part of her "sense of control" of her life.

I found him standing over a battered filing cabinet with a hammer in his hand, and immediately had a good feeling.

At a US cryonics company run by a Seventh Day Adventist, where human heads are frozen for $80,000 and bodies for $150,000, the customers include a young woman from Spain and a lawyer shot dead by one of his clients on the steps of a law library. At the time of Appleyard's visit, only sixty-seven people were in situ, with fewer than 1,000 more signed up to join.

Rackham takes great delight in surprising his reader, often subverting popular notions that have calcified into myth. One old battle he fights is the idea that industry was always the great enemy of trees, and that enterprises such as iron smelting or shipbuilding brought ruin to woodland. The clarification he often repeats is the key difference between felling, from which the wood will recover completely in time, and grubbing out, which removes for ever the means of timber production. [...] He makes plain that what really laid our woods low was their supposed lack of economic value. In the twentieth century, this notion, coupled with an insatiable and partly subsidy-driven demand for the extension of agriculture, as well as the formation of the Forestry Commission in 1919, had baleful consequences. Between 1930 and 1990, Britain lost as much as a half of all the ancient woods that had survived since the time of the Domesday Book.

In 1673, Louis had his Flemish jeweller, Sieur Pitau, undertake the risky task of cleaving then cutting the Tavernier violet down to 67.125 carats, very nearly halving it in size, but doubling its value to 400,000 livres (1691). The cleavings soon vanished, but may have reappeared briefly in the nineteenth century as the so-called Pirie and Brunswick blue diamonds, both of which have since gone to ground. The Tavernier violet stayed with the French crown jewels, and eighty years later, it was mounted...into King Louis XV's elaborate, gem-encrusted badge of the Toison d'or, the Order of the Golden Fleece. [...]

In June 1791 the Toison d'or was confiscated, along with the rest of the French crown jewels, and stored temporarily at the Garde Meuble in Paris. Thence, following a break-in fifteen months later, the jewel was stolen. It may have been an inside job. Old gossip attributes to Georges-Jacques Danton the decision to break the Hope Diamond out of its setting, then use it to bribe the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the Prussian and Austrian armies, into retreating from Valmy, where untested revolutionary forces, outnumbered two to one, were preparing to resist invasion, the purpose of which was to rescue the Royal Family. The Prussian and Austrian manoeuvre, apparently otherwise inexplicable, provided the new Government in Paris with much-needed breathing space, and indeed the monarchy was abolished the day after it, on Sep 22, 1792.

Buddicom enjoyed an idyllic childhood with her younger siblings, Prosper and Guinevir, on a Shropshire estate and at Shiplake near Henley-on-Thames, where the Blairs were neigbours. The Buddicoms first encountered Eric standing on his head in a field; it was "a good way to get noticed", he told them.