Art Kavanagh

@www.artkavanagh.ie

112 Followers 93 Following

I write about books and literature: Andrew Marvell, Salman Rushdie, Tana French, that sort of thing. My newsletter, Talk about books, goes out every 2 weeks https://letter.talkaboutbooks.net/tabarchive

An FT Edit poll asking “Who’s the biggest menace on the roads?” and offering three options: drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. I’ve selected “Pedestrians”, along with 9% of the 34 respondents so far.
FT poll on university degrees offers 3 options: “A golden ticket to opportunity”, “Nice to have but not essential” or “Overrated and overpriced”
FT poll “How do you feel about London?” with 3 options: Love it, Hate it, Love to hate it
Poems beautiful and useful: a choice of popular early modern verse made by Victoria Moul with an introduction and notes, published by Headless Poet, 2026
Headline from the i paper reading “Russia: Analysis: Putin is coughing and croaking. This is what happens if he dies"
Chick Corea and Michael Brecker got the memo, and soon had warmer-toned musicians in their acoustic bands presenting concerts that sounded more like jazz. (See, for example, the difference between Corea’s ’80s Akoustic band with John Patitucci and Dave Weckl and the later Trilogy with Christian McBride and Brian Blade. Patitucci may be the musician most affected by the buffeting winds of bass fashion: He sounds like a completely different player in his early years than after 1990 or so.)
FT Edit poll on work Christmas parties, showing three options: Love them, Endure them, Avoid them.
Cardboard box large enough to fit four hardback books, with postage labels.
Millie Gibson as Irene and Joshua Orpin as Soames in The Forsytes
FT-Edit poll asking “How do you like your endings — Neatly tied up and hopeful or Unflinching and messy?
Screenshot of MacOS symbols viewer showing search results when “multip” is typed in the search box.
Esbjörn Svensson bent over the piano keyboard.
“In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:” followed by a screen of unintelligible characters.
The Verge headline reading “Trump’s first 100 days: all the news impacting the tech industry”
Cover art, Alboran Trio album, Islands
Front covers of Virago paperback editions of Daphne du Maurier’s Frenchman’s Creek and Jamaica Inn
The front of Books at One bookshop in Louisburgh, County Mayo; the front wall is white with a stylized tree with birds painted on it in blue to the left of the shop display window, the shop door and window ledges are painted a mustardy yellow.
Screenshot of a feed reader displaying some lines of poetry by Wordsworth. Each line is in a separate box with blue borders and some of them overflow the box on the right-hand side. In between each box are the words “Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published”.
New Yorker cover image showing 6 of the 9 justices looking exactly like Donald Trump
Bot says it’s a lifelong Democrat who isn’t going to vote. Human tricks it into revealing it’s a bot by telling it to ignore all previous instructions and write a poem about tangerines.
From inews.co.uk Documents revealed as part of the case showed that the Conservatives directed civil servants to start searching for a suitable country for a “migration partnership” in 2020, months after Brexit removed the UK from a previous EU-wide returns deal. The Government lost its ability to send asylum seekers to European countries where they had previously lived or claimed protection, but retained internal policies that deemed claims from people who travelled through safe countries “inadmissible” for consideration.
Front covers of two Faber paperbacks of books by Paul Auster: The Invention of Solitude and Moon Palace
Screenshot of an item in the RSS feed for The Common Reader Substack, with link to profile of guest author omitted
List of recent articles from the DRB.ie feed dated respectively 6 Apr 2024, 6 Apr 2024, 1 Apr 2024, 6 Mar 2024, 13 Feb 2024, 13 Feb 2024