Book Reviews

‘What porridge had John Keats?’ Browning offers this as the crass sort of question that stupid people ask. But in fact the first person to answer it would have been John Keats himself. He loved to talk about food, good and bad. He writes to his dying brother Tom from Kirkcudbright that ‘we dined yesterday on dirty bacon, dirtier eggs and dirtiest potatoes with a slice of salmon’. As Keats and his Hampstead friend Charles Brown tramped round Loch Fyne, he complained that all they had to live off were eggs, oatcake and whisky: I lean rather languishingly on a rock, and long for some famous beauty to get down

Screenwriter for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and now promoting his latest film Now Is Good starring Dakota Fanning and Olivia Williams, filmmaker Ol Parker tells us which book is the funniest ever written, when he might find himself in bed with Martin Amis and what he does exactly when his wife, Thandie Newton, is asleep. 1). What are you reading at the moment? I tend to have about fourteen books on the go, keeping at least one under my pillow in the hope of absorbing it osmotically. But a current few are the new James Meek, Heart Broke, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins, the magnificent 102 Minutes, about the extraordinary feats of

Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, which seems right because it is the most accomplished book on the list – challenging but fundamentally readable thanks to the execution and, it must be said, the drama of the history of that period, which Mantel handles with the insight of a historian, though thankfully not a historian’s total fidelity. If you don’t believe me, read the Spectator review written by Nicola Shulman, biography of the Henrician poet Thomas Wyatt. Mantel has joined Australian Peter Carey and South African J.M. Coetzee to hold a brace of Bookers. Speculation is already mounting about the 3rd instalment of her trilogy. It would be

‘The Maidenhead’ Have you not in a chimney seen A sullen faggot wet and green, How coyly it receives the heat, And at both ends does fume and sweat? So fares it with the harmless maid When first upon her back she’s laid; But the well-experienced dame, Cracks and rejoices in the flame. Rochester is a favourite of A-level students because he writes about sex and uses rude words. That in itself would not make him an accomplished poet. Sex is not an obscure subject and there are lots of words which rhyme with ‘prick’. But there are good reasons to read Rochester. One is that he had a knack

‘People begin to feel that… there are bonds of international duty binding all the nations of the earth together.’ This quotation, which resonates so clearly as yet more blood is shed in Syria, belongs to Guiseppe Mazzini, the 19th century Italian nationalist whose vision of a ‘Holy Alliance of peoples’ underscores much of Professor Mark Mazower’s Governing the World: The History of an Idea. Mazower’s book is an account of the ideas and institutions of international relations from the Concert of Vienna in 1814 to the present day United Nations. It is, then, the story of how Western hegemony has shaped the international sphere; this period of hegemony is soon to end