Book Reviews

Xenophilia is as English as Stilton. Despite a reputation for insularity, no other nation has produced so many writers who have  immersed themselves in other countries. From Borrow to Lawrence, Byron to Auden, the list is impressive. In one of the wonderful letters quoted in this perceptive, haunting and highly readable biography, Patrick Leigh Fermor called living in England ‘like living in the heart of a lettuce. I pine for hot stones and thorns and olive trees and prickly pears.’ In the opinion of his biographer Artemis Cooper he had an ‘entirely European sensibility’. In the house he built in the mountains of Mani in the Peloponnese, between olive groves

James Naughtie explains why he’d give Scoop to a lover, confesses which books by another BBC luminary he does his best to avoid and finally reassures us, in case you were wondering, that he doesn’t fantasise about Lolita. He will be appearing at the Wimbledon Bookfest on 14th October to talk about his latest book, The New Elizabethans (published by Collins on 11th October, £25). He tweets @naughtiej   1). What are you reading at the moment? The Passage of Power, the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro’s fabulous biography of Lyndon Johnson; and Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways, about our ancient pathways, which is blissful. 2). As a child,

‘Should literature be political?’ Njabulo S Ndebele asked Open Book Cape Town the other day. Ndebele, a renowned academic in South Africa, has written a précis of his speech for the Guardian. He draws a distinction between political novels, which dramatise activism, and other forms of literature that ‘politicise’ by deepening awareness. His point is often sunk by his own loquacity (‘These two books [The African Child and God’s Bits of Wood] reveal the continuations between political literature and literary politics. Both achieve transcendence through art that politicises and depoliticises all at once.’); but, that aside, he makes some very compelling proposals about the role that literature can play in

It’s the last day of banned book week but perhaps we should spare a thought for banned editors. An editor at Éditions Gallimard, who worked on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, recently published three essays (with another house). The first, an account of his amorous adventures in Amsterdam, and the second, ‘Ghostly Language’, are, according to the author, to be kept in mind when tackling the final essay ‘Antiracism as the Literary Terror’ and the appendage, his pièce de resistance, ‘The Literary Eulogy of Anders Breivik’. That, in sum, is why Richard Millet is – for all the wrong reasons – one of the most famous essayists in France right

‘Write your own name a hundred times,’ T.H. White once commented, ‘and you will be bored; seven hundred times and you will be exasperated; seven thousand times, and your brains will be reeling in your head. Then you realize that you have only written one-tenth of a new novel.’ No surprise that White should display such a familiarity with the mathematics of writing; all authors do. At least the professional ones do – they have to. When your living depends on not missing deadlines, one question looms all the time: how many words are there in a day? Actually, assuming that White meant a name comprising one forename and one

Edwina Currie is very much an acquired taste and I am very happy that I acquired it in 1983 when we were both first elected to Parliament. Sassy, saucy, fiendishly bright, burning with drive and ambition, yet with a heart, she was head and shoulders above most of her male contemporaries and they hated her for it. People forget just how far Cameron has detoxified the Conservative party. Women, gays (only tolerated in the research department), blacks and Asians had a very steep if not impossible mountain to climb just to get on the candidates list, let alone have a chance of obtaining a winnable seat. Currie tells one tale