The new king of Burma in 1878:

"Thibaw suffered a great propaganda defeat in his very rise to the throne. It had been an immemorial tradition when a new king succeeded for there to be a 'purging of the real according to custom' – i.e. a massacre of the previous ruler's kinsmen. Since Thibaw was distant from the throne, he had to kill eighty-three members of the royal family. The killings were spread over two days and were carried out by members of the Royal Guard. As was customary, the princesses were strangled while the princes were sewn into red velvet sacks and gently beaten to death with paddles – it being taboo to shed royal blood. Unfortunately for Thibaw, this took place in an age when worldwide communication brought such goings-on to international attention. The details – including the fact that the mass of corpses buried in a palace courtyard creating a gas which caused the soil to erupt, so that it had to be trodden down by elephants – were all reported in the West, especially in England, where they excited very unfavourable comment."

from From the Land of Green Ghosts by Pascal Khoo Thwe

I'm doing two events in August: on Wednesday 3rd at Dialogue Books in Kreuzberg, and on Sunday 14th at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

On Tuesday 12th July I'll be asking China Miéville about his superb new novel Embassytown at a Pages of Hackney event at Moving Architecture in Clapton. Email info@pagesofhackney.co.uk to reserve a seat (£3). I find it very hard to think of a British author whose new books I look forward to with more excitement than China's so I'm really happy to be doing this – please do come along.

Tomorrow night (Saturday) I'm going to be reading a short story I've written about Kreuzberg at a SAND event in Kreuzberg. Full details here.

Nietzsche on the French Revolution in Beyond Good and Evil: "Noble and enthusiastic spectators across Europe have, from a distance, interpreted their own indignations and enthusiasms into it, and for so long and with such passion that the text has finally disappeared under the interpretation."

Also: "Every morality, as opposed to laisser-aller, is a piece of tyranny against both 'nature' and 'reason'. But this in itself is no objection; for that, we would have to issue yet another decree based on some other morality forbidding every sort of tyranny and unreason."

Also: "Even treating something in a profound or thorough manner is a violation, a wanting-to-hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces, –there is a drop of cruelty even in every want-to-know.

Big fan of this diagram from the Wikipedia page on comas.

Recently I was asked by Damian Barr on behalf of the new W Hotel in Leicester Square to be one of ten writers to choose ten books each for the hotel's library. I decided not to include any prose fiction because no one pays £500 a night for a room in central London in order to sit there reading Vanity Fair (which Bret Easton Ellis picked) from beginning to end. Here's my list:

U & I by Nicholson Baker

Banvard's Folly by Paul Collins

Nobody's Perfect by Anthony Lane

The BLDGBLOG Book by Geoff Manaugh

Absolute All Star Superman by Grant Morrison

Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris: Including Books, Street Fashion and Jewelry by Leanne Shapton

An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar by Taryn Simon

Exquisite Corpse by Michael Sorkin

Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut

The Irresponsible Self by James Wood

Lorenzo Petrantoni's cover for the UK edition of Boxer, Beetle has won one of the 2011 V&A Illustration Awards.

Now that I'm sort of weakly trying to revive my brief training in philosophy, I decided I should read the Tractatus at last, and was pleased to find that it's very short. This is my favourite statement so far:

"4.463 The truth-conditions of a proposition determine the range that it leaves open to the facts.

(A proposition, a picture, or a model is, in the negative sense, like a solid body that restricts the freedom of movement of others, and, in the positive sense, like a space bounded by solid substance in which there is room for a body.)

A tautology leaves open to reality the whole – the infinite whole – of logical space: a contradiction fills the whole of logical space leaving no point of it for reality. Thus neither of them can determine reality in any way."

One imagines a series of spaces like rooms along a corridor – some airless vacuums, others filled all the way up to the doorway with solid concrete, most in between. Hotel Borges?

Also:

"5.511 How can logical – all-embracing logic, which mirrors the world – use such peculiar crochets and contrivances (Haken und Manipulationen)? Only because they are all connected with one another in an infinitely fine network, the great mirror."

Sibling rivalry in Indonesia:

"In the late nineties Suharto's daughter Tutu proposed to construct a three-tiered above-ground transit-way through the heart of Jakarta while her brother was simultaneously planning an underground system through the same area."

from The Politics of Power by Denise Leith

South African mercenaries in Iraq:

"They were always very nicely turned out, with shirts and trousers pressed - unlike the Brits, who rarely bothered with an iron - but many of them were badly shot up, with fingers missing and scars all over their body. They also had terrible brown-stained teeth. Most had served in the Special Forces in the 1980s, fighting jungle wars in Angola. During a three-month combat tour, they couldn't use toothpaste because the smell of it could warn the Angolan scouts in the close-quarters fighting that dominated the conflict. As a result, all of their teeth were completely rotten. Once, Mark [Britten] was talking to a South African in his fifties when two teeth simply fell out of his mouth onto the table in front of them."

from War PLC by Stephen Armstrong, in which we also learn that Group 4 Securicor is Africa's largest private employer, with 82,000 employees on the continent.

"The parrot fish... inhabits more exposed areas of sea and has to create its own protection when sleeping. It does this by secreting around its body a slimy envelope, which is distasteful to predators. In the morning it packs its bags, so to speak, by eating the envelope."

from Sleepfaring by Jim Horne.

Also apparently dolphins don't dream, because they only sleep with one half of their brain at a time so they can keep going up to the surface to breathe, and "the confusion in having half one's brain dreaming and the other half awake would be bewildering to say the least. Each side of the dolphine's brain can be sleep deprived separately, simply by waking the animal up as soon as this side sleeps, while letting the other side sleep normally." Which is like something out of Philip K Dick.

Also "hibernation is not a profound form of sleep, as is commonly thought, because hibernating mammals still have to arouse from hibernation in order to obtain some sleep."

On Tuesday evening I'm doing an event at the Akademie der Künste on Pariser Platz with the French novelist Vincent Message. An actor will read in German from the first chapter of Boxer, Beetle and then I'll be answering some questions in English.

Tomorrow I am moving to Berlin to take up a three month writer's residency at the Akademie der Künste. Goodbye London!