The TLS does not have a traditional Christmas issue. The best gift, we think, is a subscription to the paper itself. So let me commend that thought, before presenting Angus Trumble’s guide this week to the perfume counters of the luxury stores. Our critic bemoans the lack of academic judgement on matters of expensive smells. The 1930 classic scent, Joy Parfum, is the perfect foil to Matisse’s “Yellow Odalisque”. We should learnedly choose Chanel No 5 and laugh knowingly at Heiress by Paris Hilton. “Is it perfume from a dress / That makes me so digress?” Absolutely. And if this month we cannot review a new contribution to the subject, whenever can we?

TLS nostrils were also stimulated by the sudden arrival here of The Hugo Young Papers, posthumously published notes from the great British political commentator on the off-the-record lunches he had shared with our leaders over a thirty-year career. As I had eaten many similar lunches with many of the same people over more or less the same time, the book was like a return journey through the redolent restaurants of London (some of them now gone, some of them now smelling slightly different), changing food, changing fashions, and changing relations between politicians and the press.

The British politician and writer Denis MacShane was one of Young’s many lunch guests. Christopher Hitchens, a connoisseur of powermenus on both sides of the Atlantic, considers his book on “the new anti-Semitism”.

This issue begins with two pieces of poetry criticism. Peter McDonald examines the critical vogue for Edward Thomas. To be considered a “poet’s poet” has been a mixed blessing for the writer: “few British poets enjoyed a better twentieth century” but the “rhetoric of praise” has brought misunderstandings too. Ian Thomson discusses the powerful poems – both olfactory and political – of the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Peter Stothard

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