Rochester's salacious textual history
At some point during the Christmas festivities at Court in 1673, Charles II and the Earl of Rochester got talking about a lampoon that was doing the rounds at Whitehall, and the King asked to see a copy. Rummaging drunkenly through his pockets, Rochester accidentally gave him the manuscript of his own “Satire on Charles II” instead. Charles may have been the “easiest King and best bred man alive”, as the poem begins by saying, but not even he could shrug off (for instance) Rochester’s account of the “pains it cost poor laborious Nelly / Whilst she employs hands, fingers, mouth and thighs / Ere she can mount the member she enjoys”. Rochester had to flee the Court and lie low for a while at his country estate. In his absence, the satire circulated unstoppably; not in print (it didn’t become printable until 1697) but through what the great Rochester scholar Harold Love termed “scribal publication”.

John Aubrey and the roots of the Royal Society

Gerard Woodward's narratives of consumption

C is for Carrefax (and Continental Theory)
Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Remainder (2005), wore its conceit heavily. An anonymous man receives £8.5 million as compensation for an accident he cannot remember. Brain damage has destroyed his spontaneity, forcing him to completely relearn bodily control. “Eventually I not only learnt to execute most actions but also came up to speed”, he tells us. “But I still had to think about each movement I made, had to understand it. No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.” The man spends his fortune assembling an army of actors and consultants, whose job is to re-stage, in continual loops, episodes that enter his mind like visions; creating precise reconstructions of specific moments (a slow afternoon in a block of flats; a visit to a garage; a bank heist) through which the narrator wanders compulsively, over and over again.