Birthday present from the Bard

David Blackburn

Monday, 23rd April 2012

St. George’s Day, 23rd April, is Shakespeare’s birthday. You may get a present, if you are in the right place at the right time. World Book Night, the event where enthusiasts give a book to passers-by, will take place this evening. The organisers hope that 2.5 million copies of 25 books will be given away by 78,000 volunteers in the United States, Britain, Germany and Ireland.

This massive undertaking is laudable, even though the selection of books is wholly unimaginative. Martina Cole, Audrey Niffenegger and Bernard Cornwell may not need more readers, but their best-selling pot-boilers might get more people reading. Like...

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Across the literary pages: Facing death

David Blackburn

Monday, 23rd April 2012

Man has conquered his inhibitions to talk about everything other than his own demise. Death is, famously, the last taboo — and, judging by many of the reviews of Philip Gould’s When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone, we are no closer to breaking it.

The novelist Justin Cartwright describes himself as ‘racked with doubt’ about the correct response of the reviewer of a book that charts a man’s preparations for death from oesophageal...

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Bookbenchers: Liz Truss MP

The Spectator

Sunday, 22nd April 2012

Parliament is back from the Easter recess, and so is the Spectator’s Bookbenchers. First back into the hotseat is Elizabeth Truss, the Tory MP for South West Norfolk. She is inundated with children’s books, and wants to get to grips with some serious science.

1) Which book's on your bedside table at the moment?

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Britannia: One Hundred Documents That Shaped a Nation by Graham Stewart.

2) Which book would you read to your children?

Edward Lear Nonsense, Alice in Wonderland —...

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Interview: Jonathan Haidt on left vs right

David Blackburn

Friday, 20th April 2012

Why are Dennis Skinner and George Osborne locked in enmity? The answer, according to Jonathan Haidt, lies beyond the obvious partisan explanation, and reaches back into humanity’s first nature. Haidt is a professor of moral and social psychology at the University of West of West Virginia, who has written a compelling book, The Righteous Mind, which argues that politics is determined by evolutionary biology and what he terms ‘Moral Foundations Theory’. In a little over 300 pages of incisive prose, Haidt presents a theory that explains why politics is always personal.

His research shows that our...

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The art of fiction: April showers, Thomas Becket and Geoffrey Chaucer

David Blackburn

Friday, 20th April 2012

April showers break the long March drought, and bring pilgrims to Canterbury; to the shrine, or what remains of it, of St Thomas Becket.

There are several historic routes to Canterbury: the Pilgrim’s Way, which runs along the Downs escarpment from Winchester through Sussex and Kent. And there are more modern paths, such as the Via Francigena, which begins in Rome. Canterbury Cathedral’s website says that the pilgrimage from Rome has grown popular in the last...

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A pilgrim’s progress

Matthew Richardson

Thursday, 19th April 2012

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce starts with a wonderfully simple idea. Harold Fry, resident of 13 Fossebridge Road, gets a letter from an old friend, Queenie Hennessy, saying she is dying of cancer. He drafts a reply and goes out to post it. He reaches the post box and, instead of slotting it in, decides to walk to the next one. And the next one after that. Before long, he concludes that...

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