Every writer’s nightmare

Mark Mason

Thursday, 19th April 2012

It’s every writer’s nightmare – losing the only existing copy of your current book. Doesn’t happen that often these days, what with the mantra of the modern world being ‘Thou Shalst Back Up’. What’s particularly galling for Francis Wheen is that he had backed up, in the surest way possible, namely printing out a copy of the his latest novel. But even that isn’t enough when you suffer the fate that befell Wheen last Friday: his garden shed, which acted as his office, burned to the ground. It contained not just the printed copy, not just the...

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Pakistan’s descent into chaos

Shiraz Maher

Wednesday, 18th April 2012

Few countries elicit as much bewilderment as Pakistan — unstable and unreliable, it is simultaneously a friend and foe. Indeed, over the last decade Islamabad has arguably aided the War on Terror as much as it has hindered it. The stakes could barely be higher. A nuclear power in which terrorist groups operate with near impunity, it sits in the strategic heart of South Asia bordering Iran, Afghanistan, China, and India. Its Baluchistan port, Gwadar, is just 200 miles from the Straits of Hormuz — a vital channel for seaborne oil exports threatened with blockade by the Iranians should...

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Shelf Life: Perdita Weeks

The Spectator

Wednesday, 18th April 2012

The actress Perdita Weeks has answered our impertinent questions this week. Those who imagine her to be a romantic will be disappointed: she's very practical when it comes to love and books. She recently starred in Julian Fellowes' Titanic on ITV.

1) What are you reading at the moment?

I am reading The Return of The Native by Thomas Hardy (in an attempt to make up for not doing English A-Level) and The Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin: as I am playing Maria Ternan in the screen adaptation of the tale of Dickens' love...

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The tablet wars

David Blackburn

Wednesday, 18th April 2012

The London Book Fair (LBF) is not much to write home about, although there is something about the spectacle of Chinese apparatchiks shooting the breeze with what appear to be battalions of enhanced women from Eastern Europe.

But, LBF is the latest theatre in the tablet wars. The saga of Waterstones and the Barnes&Noble Nook continues. The companies have apparently agreed to enter partnership, after months of secret deliberations which were conducted in anything but secret. However, any official announcement has been pushed back until the summer. This deal has been dragging on for nearly a year,...

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What Mrs Beeton did to us

William Sitwell

Wednesday, 18th April 2012

I have a beaten up old copy of a book from the late 19th century that sits among my collection of recipe volumes in my study at home. When I retrieve this particular doorstop of a tome, the back falls off and gnarled pages flutter to the floor. I pick them up and recipe 1,790 catches my eye: ‘Bread and Butter Pudding, Steamed’. It's one recipe among 2,070 odd pages and it’s from a collection that is widely considered to be one of the greatest cookbooks in the English language.

Beeton’s Book of Household Management was...

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St Joe’s parish

Andrew Humphreys

Tuesday, 17th April 2012

There is already a patron saint of bartenders, St Amand, a seventh-century French monk who acquired credibility by bringing back to life a hanged criminal and parlayed his fame into a life spent founding monasteries. But if ever a replacement figurehead were sought, then the profession could do worse than look to Joe Scialom (above left). These days his name is known only to a few booze aficionados, but from 1937 to 1952 he presided over the Long Bar at Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo.

Few remember Shepheard’s either, but a century ago it was one of the...

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