Earlier this month I heard a seminar paper about centaurs, which ranged across the history of thinking about these hybrid horse-people from ancient Athens to sixteenth-century England. Along the way the speaker, Micha Lazarus, referred to Lucretius, who dismissed the possibility of centaurs on the grounds that the life-cycles of horse and human were so different (‘a horse reaches its vigorous prime in about three years, a boy far from it’).

The discussion reminded me of a twelve-line poem by William Empson called ‘Invitation to Juno’, which begins:

Lucretius could not credit centaurs;
Such bicycle he deemed asynchronous.
‘Man superannuates the horse;
Horse pulses will not gear with ours.’

These lines, first published in 1928 when Empson was a student in Cambridge, refer to the myth of Ixion, a mortal king who attempted to have an affair with Juno, wife of Jupiter, but was foiled by her husband who sent a cloud in place of his wife. Ixion’s union with the cloud led to the creation of the race of centaurs, whose nature conjoins two cycles–‘such bicycle’, as Empson puts it. (As punishment for trying to father a demigod, a ‘two-wheeler’, Jupiter fastened Ixion to a single burning wheel).

Like many of Empson’s poems, ‘Invitation to Juno’ reads like a cryptic crossword. It’s bizarrely compressed and requires elaborate decoding. The poem alludes not just to Lucretius, but also to Darwin, Dr Johnson, and the growth of embryonic heart tissue; it’s not surprising that it requires three and a half pages of notes in the latest scholarly edition by John Haffenden. But were Empson’s sources all abstrusely learned? Yesterday I nearly fell off my own bike when I passed this ‘ghost sign‘ on King St in Cambridge.

It turns out that a company called Centaur Cycles, based in Coventry, made bikes from 1876 to 1915 (they were taken over by Humber in 1910, and production moved to Stoke). There are some lovely examples of their advertisements here; the testimonials report that a Centaur is ‘a wonderful machine’ which ‘mounts hills splendidly’–‘a great luxury after a cheap and nasty mount’. Empson was later known for devotion to a clapped-out bike; a student at Sheffield in the 1950s recalls his riding a ‘very old, preposterously rusty sit-up-and-beg bicycle, wobbling stoically amid the smog and tramlines of Western Bank’. Was it, I wonder, the last of the Centaurs, asynchronous as ever? Or did Empson just see this sign (or signs like it), and start thinking about the intricate relationship between man and mount, ravelling up the tangle of allusions in the poem?

After the death of playwright Harold Pinter on Christmas Eve, 2008, the Guardian published the last interview he had given, earlier that year, with one of the paper’s journalists. Pinter spoke from his London home, mainly about one of the great passions of his life: cricket. Recalling the occasion, Andy Bull describes Pinter’s study as ‘heavy with the clutter of a cricket fan’, with shelves which ‘creaked under his cricket library, including all 145 editions of the Wisden Almanack’. As Bull points out, the appeal of cricket to one who writes plays is palpable, in its ‘endless potential for narrative, the games within a game’. Today the British Library revealed that those weighty Wisdens turned out to play a crucial role in another narrative – that of an important new acquisition of letters written by Pinter between 1948 and 1960. Sent to friends when Pinter was a young man, none of the letters came with a date, presenting a significant problem for the Library’s curators. But Pinter’s love for cricket – what he once described as ‘the greatest thing that God created on earth’ – is manifest throughout them, and his frequent cricketing references became invaluable clues. The curators cunningly matched these up with the details in Wisden volumes to identify dates for the letters, in an enviably neat synthesis of epistolary remains and contemporaneous material texts.

This unusual paperback novel caught my eye recently (and most serendipitously, on a shelf of free books in a railway station waiting room! I’ll leave something in its place when I’m next there…). This copy of Mr Emmanuel  is a special ‘Services Edition’, produced for the Services Central Book Depot in London, for distribution to the Allied Forces. Although I’ve found a lot of information about a similar scheme in operation in the USA during the 1940s (the American Armed Services Editions), less has been written about the story of books like this one. There are some avid collectors, and this photograph from Getty Images shows great piles of books in preparation at the Depot, in 1944.

The book is printed on very thin paper, in a size surely intended to fit the pocket of a uniform, and the pages are held together with two sturdy metal staples. Golding’s novel, about a Russian Jewish refugee  who travels from England to Germany, was originally published in 1938, and made into a film in 1944, and so this would have been distinctly topical and contemporary reading matter when it was sent out to the Forces in the 1940s. In several ways, then, it’s a markedly ephemeral text, and I wonder how many others like it have survived.

Coming back down to earth after the fascinating conference on ‘Failure in the Archives‘ at the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters (University of London) on Thursday. The conference culminated in a lengthy open discussion about how the myth of the ‘invisible archive’–the archive that functions as the neutral holder and transmitter of its materials–could be busted once and for all. This might mean finding ways in which archivists, librarians and curators could be fully credited for their intellectual contributions, so that they would cease to be viewed merely gatekeepers and custodians of the past. There are formidable obstacles to this, mainly to do with the funding pressures that dog the majority of collections. But the conversation seemed to offer a glimpse into a brighter future.

After the conference there was a guest lecture from Natalie Zemon Davis, who is just coming up to her 86th birthday but appears to be more radiant and full of energy than ever. She shared some of her recent work on the slaves of eighteenth-century Surinam, and offered a masterclass in the kinds of patience and ingenuity that are needed to make the archives speak, or sing.