David Wheatley
nemoloris.bsky.social
David Wheatley
@nemoloris.bsky.social
Cairngorm-regarder. Bairn-herder.
Only catching up with this now: Jeremy Noel-Tod on The Poems of Seamus Heaney. literaryreview.co.uk/the-pen-the-...
Jeremy Noel-Tod - The Pen & the Spade
Jeremy Noel-Tod: The Pen & the Spade - The Poems of Seamus Heaney by Rosie Lavan, Bernard O’Donoghue and Matthew Hollis (edd.)
literaryreview.co.uk
November 11, 2025 at 8:27 AM
Filling in a page on my workplace's research database today, I found myself obliged to select the function marked 'create external person'.
November 10, 2025 at 4:41 PM
George Moore thought this 'the most perfect prose narrative in English letters.'
November 10, 2025 at 4:12 PM
Delighted to read in a description of the 'Rhynie chert', a famous Devonian archaeological sample from upper Donside, that it contains 'the oldest known sex-organs in world history'.
November 8, 2025 at 6:24 PM
Corse Castle and environs, near Tarland.
November 8, 2025 at 4:54 PM
Psychopharmacology and Sexual
Disorders by David Wheatley. Signed copies available on request.
November 8, 2025 at 7:51 AM
I see the world is full of one-star reviews of Charlotte Brontë's Shirley. Canonical authors' most-maligned books (Shirley, Barnaby Rudge, Romola, St Ronan's Well, The Virginians...): would make a promising subject for an essay collection.
November 5, 2025 at 8:43 PM
More facial profiling in Charlotte Brontë, as an Irish curate in Shirley wears the appearance not just of a Native American but a Native American who owns a slave plantation, of all things.
November 5, 2025 at 10:32 AM
Does anyone, I wonder, still agree with Donald Davie's negative judgement on The Dry Salvages as 'quite simply a bad poem', 'a case of sheer incompetence'?
academic.oup.com/eic/article-...
November 4, 2025 at 2:14 PM
A mouse young Morven made for a friend whose birthday it was yesterday. Like the ancient Gauls gathering to attack Caesar, it occurred to me, the partygoers descended on the festivities ex tribus partibus.
November 4, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Withdrawn books, an occasional series.
November 3, 2025 at 8:03 AM
Very sorry to hear Hull poet Maurice Rutherford (b. 1922) has died at a great age.
November 2, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Amusing to see the classicists at the Daily Mail, firing the latest salvoes in their gender wars, numbering Germaine Greer among Newnham College’s famous ‘alumni’.

(One might modestly propose unfamiliarity with the declensions of ‘alumnus’ as good grounds for revoking a degree, if they have one.)
November 2, 2025 at 8:00 AM
What is Webern’s Symphony at Aberdeen music hall if not my last night of the proms. Hoping therefore to sing along tunelessly to its reversible tone-row.
November 1, 2025 at 7:12 PM
A first review of Tom Paulin's Namanlagh, inter alia. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...
November 1, 2025 at 10:15 AM
I am distraught at the death of our dear and wonderful colleague Andrew Gordon. A terrible loss.
October 31, 2025 at 1:21 PM
If my life subdivided into Beethoven opus numbers, what number am I currently at, I ask myself, sitting down to play this.
October 31, 2025 at 9:30 AM
Amid his spirited phrenological diagnoses of imbecility, viciousness and degeneracy in Belgian schoolgirls, Crimsworth in Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor takes a moment to tell us one girl ‘had precisely the same shape of skull as Pope Alexander the Sixth’.
October 30, 2025 at 9:59 AM
From my homage to Ian Hamilton Finlay, born on this day a hundred years ago.
October 28, 2025 at 3:08 PM
Amusing when your daughter finds a rabbit skeleton and a while later your wife asks ‘Do you have Morven’s skull or do I?’

Plus, an unexpected forest fire across the glen.
October 27, 2025 at 4:55 PM
Majestic Kildrummy, home of the Earl of Mar, ill-fated fomenter of the 1715 Rising.
October 27, 2025 at 12:39 PM
Full marks for persistence to Ferdia the cat who, barred from the house with his dead bird, has elected to post its head though the cat flap.
October 27, 2025 at 9:51 AM
The space of a door.
October 26, 2025 at 1:59 PM