being a record, week-on-week, of the astounding digressive fragment detail or item which sets each issue of the LRB apart from any other publication, similar or elsewise

ha ! yeah, i def relied on some creative googling, too

Mark: in general I have seen more (but few) typos in the LRB in say last 3 years, when I used to see none.

I'm on issue of 21st May.

I find it hilarious that Edward Luttwak begins an article on Italian fascist military failure with this, a random element that isn't about said failure at all:

Scuba diving​ was pioneered in Italy and so was the combat frogman and all his equipment, including hand-placed limpet mines and the explosive motor boats and manned torpedoes that the Japanese would copy as suicide weapons – the originals allowed the operators to save themselves, if they were lucky. With a tiny fraction of the Italian navy’s resources, between 1941 and 1943 Italy’s sea commandos destroyed two British battleships, wrecked a heavy cruiser and two destroyers as well as 18 supply ships and tankers. Aside from much technical ingenuity, this exemplary force multiplier required heroism of a particular kind, not just individual but collective, not just episodic but habitual: the fragile prototypes that made up the equipment could be deadly even in training, let alone when intruding into enemy harbours and through torpedo nets.

the combat frogman and all his equipment

https://img.favpng.com/16/12/1/axel-f-crazy-frog-youtube-popcorn-song-png-favpng-DQjzQiHt6pXWAfy31juAVym2D.jpg

insta-fp

a-nim-nim-NAH

"Floating through wonderful, sometimes ominous, scenery for five days, Stella fell into a dream-like state, not unlike moods in a Chinese poetics of which she was unaware"

fuck OFF perry

this piece is readable and fascinating as regards the history -- though the attempt to frame it as a memoir of PA's father doesn't really work (memoir not entirely his forte)

Do I need/want to read the ongoing France Stonor-Saunders thing in the last couple of issues?

Don't read it if you want to know what's in the suitcase. Or if you don't really care about the life stories of this guy's parents and grandparents and great grandparents.

Not a guy! Sorry.

From this review: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-crewe/a-girl-called-retina

Julie Welch’s father, we are told, turned into such a drunk that he once ‘“plumped up” the dog, thinking it was a sofa cushion’.

been a bit useless updating this good and handy thread, apologies all

From Nicholas Penny's review of Rosemary Hill's Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism: "The century before Scott’s The Antiquary (1816) saw the burgeoning of a type of antiquarianism about which Hill has less to say. It is well illustrated by Three Hours after Marriage, a farce written by John Gay, with the assistance of John Arbuthnot and the young Alexander Pope, which was performed at Drury Lane in 1717. The leading character, Dr Fossile, has just married a much younger woman (‘the best of my curiosities’) and is unaware that two would-be seducers have moved into his domestic museum: Plotwell, disguised as an Egyptian mummy, and Underplot, as an alligator. I refrain from revealing the outcome but note that the mummy and the alligator, like coins and shells, neatly illustrate the artificial and the natural curiosities studied by the man who inspired the character of Fossile: John Woodward (1665-1728), then a figure hardly less eminent than Newton."

dr fossile! they don't write em like that any more (plays)

missed a bunch of possibilities recently but this made me grin this morning:

"Then, in 1733, [Curll] advertised his intention of publishing a Life of Pope, for which ‘nothing shall be wanting but his (universally desired) Death,’ and asked people to supply him with ‘Memoirs &c’ to fuel it" (from Colin Burrow on Pope and hius feud with the publisher Edmund Curll, 21 Apr 22)

not actually very digressive but still a good detail