Peter Robins

The ocean that Christopher Oldstone-Moore has set out to chart is as broad as it is shallow: what it has meant to be bearded or shaven in the western world, from before Alexander the Great until the present day. Practicalities — shaving technology and the like — are mentioned from time to time, but only so that their importance can be minimised. His thing is the semiotics of beards. And the range of signals that a beard could send out, over so many years, is bewildering. To be clean-shaven is to be a god, a priest, Louis XIV, a French conservative of the early 19th century or a 20th-century organisation man. To be bearded is to be a philosopher, a warrior, a Renaissance prince, an extreme French radical of the early 19th century or a respectable Victorian paterfamilias.

No one owns a Kindle for very long without becoming obsessed by its social highlighting feature: unless you go into the preferences to turn it off, the glibbest and most epigrammatic sentences in any popular book begin to appear with dotted lines underneath them and the words '19 [or however many] people highlighted this'. Our own Mark Mason has written brilliantly and sympathetically  about the consequences. But it is now necessary to admit that he may have missed a trick. It turns out you may be able to use Kindle highlights to make a rough estimate of how many people are actually reading a book, as opposed to just buying it. The technique was described by Jordan Ellenburg in the Wall Street Journal; I saw it on the reliably interesting academic blog Crooked Timber.

One of Philip Hensher's many qualities as a critic is that he doesn't take prisoners. So his entertaining and judicious guide to the Man Booker longlist ended like this: 'The shortlist should comprise McCann, Tóibín, Mendelson, Crace, House and Catton. House’s novel is the one you ought to read, and Mendelson’s the one that everyone will read and love. The prize will go to Crace.' We now know whether the judges have followed his advice. Answer: they went halfway with him. They have Jim Crace's Harvest – so his tip for the winner is still on – Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.

For a few days last week, it seemed that Jonathan Lethem had achieved something unique: he had become the first person to use a particular four-letter word - the one beginning with F - in the New York Times. (Sensitive readers should be warned that I will stop using euphemisms after this sentence.) 'I’m delighted,' he told Salon's Laura Miller, who spotted the transgression in an editor's note to the paper's glossy style magazine. 'If I’d had the foresight to make it one of my life’s aspirations, I’d have done so. Instead it lands as dumb luck. My UK friend Dan Fox pointed out that it puts me with John Cleese, the first person to say "shit" on the BBC.' Almost.

When you walk into a new branch library, or stumble across an unfamiliar secondhand bookshop, which writer do you look for? They can't be too obscure; the idea is to find something. They must be prolific; you're looking for something that's new to you. And they must be reliable: you want to be sure that your discovery will be worth your time. The classic answer is PG Wodehouse. Mine has always been Elmore Leonard. Leonard, whose death was announced today, was a consummate professional pleasure-giver. More than 40 novels over more than 50 years: first westerns, then crime, standard consistently high.

Beginning with what he finds to be a rather implausible account of a meeting between Dickens and Dostoevsky, Eric Naiman's recent essay for the Times Literary Supplement spins out an astonishing story of suspect scholarship. I very much recommend reading it if you haven't already. At the centre of the mystery is an independent historian named A.D. Harvey, and a bewildering variety of other names from letters pages and scholarly journals - Stephanie Harvey, John Schellenberger, Trevor McGovern, Leo Bellingham - that may or may not belong to him. The piece raises all sorts of questions. If you work for a magazine, however, it raises one question with particular urgency: did any of these people write to us?

Fancy a walk into London's past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can't promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today. The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic Kelly employed agents to call at every address in London and to record the people or businesses within. Kelly was a postal official, and his agents, at least to begin with, were postmen. There was some scandal about that. Because this wasn't an official census, conducted every ten years and then locked away for a century; this was a commercial operation, conducted annually and sold in a big fat book, the Post Office London Directory.

In honour of the Essex lion, which seems now to have passed into legend, here is another urban myth. This one is subeditorial. It concerns what was said to be the worst headline ever published in one of the regional newspapers where I was a trainee. Since I'm presenting it in its pure mythic form, as passed from subeditor to subeditor without contamination by fact-checking or archive searches, I am not going to name the newspaper in question. I was told the story in the early 2000s. It happened in the 1970s - recently enough that some of the paper's subs could claim to have been there (though no one ever claimed responsibility), but long enough ago for the anecdote to have been worn smooth in the telling. And it was a story about a lion.