James Walton

Strange bedfellows: Charles Dickens and the popstar Prince

Nick Hornby yokes the two in an enjoyable jeu d’esprit – but, apart from troubled childhoods and prodigious energy, the thing they really share is Hornby’s admiration

By his death, Charles Dickens had written four million words of fiction, decades’ worth of journalism and more than 14,000 letters. In his spare time he walked 12 miles a day. [Getty Images] 
issue 05 November 2022
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  • Dickens and Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius

    Nick Hornby

    Viking, pp. 112, £9

One test of how famous a writer has become, I’d suggest, is what jeux d’esprit they’re allowed to publish. By this criterion, Nick Hornby still has some distance to go before he matches Haruki Murakami, who in 2020 gave us Murakami T – a fully illustrated guide to his own T-shirts.

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