Just ten minutes previously, he felt a sudden urge, he says, to remember the last verse from W.H Auden’s ‘Fall of Rome’.

He raises the note, which he’s scribbled on with black biro, projecting each word with a careful steady cadence:

‘All together elsewhere, vast/ Herds of reindeer move across/ miles and miles of golden moss/ Silently and very fast.’

We’re here to talk about Durcan’s 22nd collection of poetry Praise In Which I Live and Move And Have My Being, but the conversation has strayed to a time when the naive 19-year-old poet arrived in London in search of work.

The year was 1964. He came with his friend and fellow poet: the late Michael Hartnett. Eventually Durcan found himself a desk job at the North-Thames-Gas-Board. “It was terrible, the end of the road. I’m ashamed to say that I bailed out after three months, but it seemed to me like an eternity,” he says.

Every afternoon on his lunch break — to distract his soul from the physical and mental ennui of his]]> JP O’Malley Fri, 25 May 2012 13:30:50 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7868283/the-art-of-fiction-george-orwell.thtml

The Orwell Prize was awarded this week, which gives cause to consider Orwell himself. Biographer D.J. Taylor tries to delineate the myths that have arisen around Orwell in the film above, but can provide only an impression. Lack of evidence is, of course, a major problem. Orwell’s archive, though extensive, seems incomplete, and no recording of him survives, not even of his voice. He remains a tantalising figure.

The body of Orwell’s writing proves similarly problematic. It is far from consistent philosophically or stylistically, and veers with equal brilliance between prophesy and paranoia. This is not altogether surprising. Much of Orwell’s work was reportage or a fictionalised account of the world around him, of which he was trying to make sense. Animal Farm and 1984, published towards the end of life, foreshorten the lens somewhat, tempting the reader to assume that Orwell was always a man of settled beliefs.

Christopher Hitchens once remarked that Orwell was right about the three central questions of the 20th Century: imperialism, fascism]]> David Blackburn Fri, 25 May 2012 10:42:15 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7866518/a-writers-vanity.thtml ‘Jordan’s fourth biography, that’s vanity.  Only writers are subjected to this kind of inquisition about how their work reaches the viewer,’ quipped a panelist at a recent Birkbeck University event on self-publishing. Someone had mentioned the pejorative, ‘vanity press’ and the room of writers stirred. All were seated in neat rows in a wood paneled lecture hall off Russell Square. Appropriate given that Virginia Woolf, who once lived two blocks away, self-published.

Previously, this was known as private publishing. According to Alison Baverstock, another panelist and authority on self-publishing, the Bronte sisters, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, James Joyce, all covered the initial cost of bringing their work to market, at one point in their careers. Devices, like the Kindle and iPad, along with websites, like Blurb and Create Space, have simplified the process.

Advantages? Self-publishing gets you closer to your reader. ‘Publishers sell to retailers, not readers,’ Orna Ross said. She began as a writer with a major publisher before buying back her rights and self-publishing. Now she chooses book covers and titles her readers prefer, instead of what suits the Tesco shelf.

It also lets you publish]]> Steven McGregor Thu, 24 May 2012 13:25:44 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7866153/travelling-tales.thtml I happened to be with some family friends the other day. The daughter, just out of school, is soon to go travelling to various far-flung destinations and to this end she was busy assembling her backpack — a stage I remember all too well from my own first big trip.

Trying to fit everything you will need for the next six months inside something small enough to go on your back should be a liberating experience, but I found it alarming to say the least. As well as a scant assortment of clothes, I remember squeezing in all sorts of odd things like quick-drying trousers, a clothes line, a sink plug, a very peculiar and teeny-tiny travel towel, masses of insect repellent, half a pharmacy, and a terribly expensive medical kit containing my own syringes and things, as the doctor said, having pumped me full of jabs, just in case. Well the insect repellent came in handy, but the towel was as good as useless and most hostels already had clothes lines and plugs in place. Before long, I realised that I could not have been more over-prepared with expensive, unnecessary kit.

The thing for]]> Emily Rhodes Thu, 24 May 2012 09:37:25 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7864413/shelf-life-mary-killen.thtml The journalist and author Mary Killen is in the limelight this week. In addition to writing the Dear Mary column in the Spectator every week, she has written a self-help book about the loving Queen. How the Queen Can Make You Happy will be published on 1 June.

1) As a child, what did you read under the covers?

The William stories by Richmal Crompton and the The Passion Flower Hotel, which turned out to be secretly written not by a schoolgirl but by Roger Longrigg the father of Fan Longrigg, the singer and producer of The Land of Sometimes a charming 2012 CD to inspire musical participation in children, Sir Robert Mayer-style.  .

2) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?

The Pursuit of Love, by Nancy Mitford, when the Linda character cannot read the longed-for wartime letter from her true love, Fabrice because his handwriting is too luxuriant.

3) You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?

]]> The Spectator Wed, 23 May 2012 13:27:14 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7863873/allan-bloom-prophet-of-doom.thtml Allan Bloom’s famous book, The Closing of the American Mind, opens with the following sentence:

‘There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.’

In the twenty-five years that have passed since the book's publication, that belief has become, if anything, even more ubiquitous. It’s not simply true of American universities, it’s true of British universities as well. Indeed, this all-encompassing relativism — which Bloom says is regarded as ‘a moral postulate, the condition of a free society’ — is shared by the educated and uneducated alike. The only people in contemporary Britain who don’t believe it are religious fanatics, such as Islamic Fundamentalists, and they’re regarded as peculiar — insane, even — precisely because they think their particular beliefs are true.
        
How did this happen? The superficial answer is that children are taught to believe this. If they happen to be studying the International Baccalaureate, they are literally taught it. One of the core requirements in the IB diploma is something called ‘Theory of Knowledge’ — or TOK for short — which is essentially a]]> Toby Young Wed, 23 May 2012 09:14:51 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7862233/coes-lordly-challenge.thtml Britain can look back with pride and nostalgia to the great Olympic Games of the past.  London in 1908, and the so-called ‘austerity Games’ of 1948, were great triumphs. Against the odds of time and money, these were Games to savour — etched in the memory with flickering black-and-white images of hope. 

This is the third time that London has held the Games (no other city can match this) but London has bid for them only once — for the 2012 Games. The Olympics of 1908 and 1948 came to London because no-one else wanted them.

Bizarrely, and this may tell us much about Britain’s sporting and class-bound heritage, all three of London’s Games have been masterminded by lords. The latest of the trio is Lord Coe, Baron Coe of Ranmore.

In 1908, Lord Desborough, the perfect Edwardian sportsman — cricketer, sculler, fencer and huntsman — masterminded the Games in just two years when a near bankrupt Rome pulled out following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. He bequeathed the Edwardian concept of ‘play up, play up and play the game’, which was to set the tone of international sport for seventy years.

Precise details of the deal have not yet been released, which has prompted speculation across the trade press. Commentators’ main concern is what is in this for Waterstones, especially after the firm’s managing director, James Daunt, recently described Amazon as a ‘ruthless, money-making devil’. But, if you can’t beat the devil then you best submit to him. Waterstones has re-entered the digital market by teaming up with a market leader which offers consumers the best value for money. This is a more ready approach than devising its own e-reader so late in the]]> David Blackburn Tue, 22 May 2012 10:16:03 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7860223/voices-of-the-taliban.thtml Sun Tzu is responsible for the age-old cliché about knowing your enemy. I wonder, then, what he might have made of Poetry of the Taliban, edited by Alex Strick Van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn. This is a new collection of verses translated from Pashtun and Urdu. The poems originally appeared on Mujahedeen websites, in newsheets or on scraps of paper.

You might expect the poems to be reactionary or propagandistic — and, for sure, there is blood and thunder. But reviewers also talk of empathy, aesthetic sensibility and the familiar worries of young men in love. Michael Semple, the EU’s former representative in Afghanistan, said:

‘This is an essential work. The book holds its own as an apolitical work of aesthetics, but actually is full of political meaning. It delves into the Afghan imagination and discovers aesthetic wealth that those content with the superficialities of press releases or think tank reports could not dream of.’

While William Dalrymple remarked:

'This extraordinary collection is remarkable as a literary project -- uncovering a seam of war poetry few will know ever existed, and presenting to us for the first time the]]> David Blackburn Mon, 21 May 2012 11:41:30 +0100 http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/blog/7860093/across-the-literary-pages-bumper-issues.thtml It’s a fact of life: death and destruction make for compulsive reading. The latest tome in the apocalypse genre is Callum Roberts’s, Ocean of Life: How our seas and changing. The book describes how man has ravaged and defiled the oceans, and explains how our rapacious stewardship is damaging us. Thanks to over-fishing, fossil fuels and lax waste disposal, Roberts says, an aquatic catastrophe looms.

The Sunday Times gave Roberts a rave review (£). A man named Brian Schofield wrote:

‘There isn’t much optimism in Roberts’s conclusions regarding climate change and the oceans, just a declaration that “there is a less dismal future ahead if we quickly wean society off fossil fuels”. But his message on overfishing is much more distinct and direct: “We must set up parks at sea, and lots of them.” Fishing-free marine reserves work: when the Isle of Arran established one in 2008, the undersea “desert” became “lush and healthy” after just two years. He reminds us that our government pledged to create a national network of Marine Conservation Zones by 2012, but that timetable has drifted. Ocean of Life is the sort of book that inspires you]]> David Blackburn Mon, 21 May 2012 10:34:51 +0100