Book Reviews

A few years ago, I wrote a piece about the Lonely Planet guide to Burma. I looked at how the supposedly right-on publishers sweetened the rule of the military so that western tourists could travel with a clean conscience. The crimes of the junta — which had the appropriately sinister name of the Slorc — could be discounted, the guidebook said. Tourists should not worry about the conscripted workers who built their hotels because forced labour is ‘on the wane’. Maybe Lonely Planet had an ideological reason to whitewash dictatorships, I speculated. Or perhaps it was a cheapskate enterprise that did not much care what it published, as long as

The inclusion of Will Self on the Booker long list was like a flashing neon sign pointing towards ‘Serious Literature’ and away from last year’s much criticised populism. In a recent interview in the Observer, the columnist, cultural pundit, professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University and novelist asserted ‘I don’t write for readers.’ Anyone brave enough to pick up Umbrella (at once a reference to James Joyce, to anti-shell device in the trenches, to a retracted foreskin revealing a prepuce, to an intra-muscular syringe and to the structure of the novel which spans out from a single scene) would find, as Mark Lawson in the Guardian also put it, ‘no textual divisions,

Over at the books blog, Tory MP Philip Davies has answered our Bookbencher questionnaire. Davies is the present holder of the Readers’ Representative at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. He believes that 1984 is the book that best describes now; and he would rescue the three volumes of Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography from the burning British Library. Davies is known by some as the ‘darling of the right’, but after this he should be nicknamed The Gruffalo.

Adrian Heath (1920—92), like so many artists, was a mass of contradictions. Jane Rye begins her excellent study of him by quoting Elizabeth Bishop: ‘A life’s work is summed up as the dialectic of captivity and freedom, of fixed form and poetic extravagance, of social norms and personal deviance.’ Heath thought of his painting as an attempt to reconcile the intellectual and the sensual, a meeting point of classical and romantic. Roger Hilton complained that Heath couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a painter or an accountant. Certainly, Heath did not conform to the public’s cherished image of the artist as bohemian. He wore a suit to visit galleries,

When I won the first Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, it was gratifying for me on every level. It helped me find a market for my work in the national press, and gave me the confidence to regard myself as a full-time writer. – Hilary Mantel. The Shiva Naipaul prize is awarded to the writer best able to describe a visit to a foreign place or people. The award will not be for travel writing in the conventional sense, but for the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer. Such a culture might be found as easily within the writer’s native country as outside it. The

When you begin in subediting – the odd little craft of preparing other people’s journalism for publication – certain things, or pairs of things, are drummed into you. St James’ Park is where Newcastle United play; St James’s Park is where the band of the Grenadier Guards play. Lloyds is the bank; Lloyd’s is the insurance market. Pontin’s has an apostrophe; Butlins doesn’t. Unfortunately for subeditors, times change. St James’ Park is now the Sports Direct Arena, although a similar deal has yet to be done for St James’s Park. Lloyds has acquired TSB and been acquired, in turn, by the government. Pontins has emerged from financial difficulties, but it