Book Reviews

‘What we all really want is for America to be what it once was,’ said Margaret Atwood at a recent writers’ event organised by the New York Times. She was discussing America’s present and immediate future with Martin Amis and E.L. Doctorow. They each wrote a piece for the New York Times Sunday Review on the subject, and each concluded that America, both as an idea and an entity, has been shaken by divisive and disconnected politics, an overbearing and undemocratic judiciary, a profoundly illiberal response to terrorism, the moral bankruptcy caused by corporate greed, and ingrained racial tensions. America is no longer a beacon of freedom and prosperity; as

I’ve come late to this, but the trailer for Baz Luhrmann’s film adaptation of The Great Gatsby is striking. It is everything that you would expect of Luhrmann: sensational, self-conscious and hysterically camp. I doubt that anyone expected a literal interpretation from Luhrmann, but few can have anticipated this total re-imagining of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s beloved classic. The modern score, the cavernous nightclubs, the idiomatic speech — it’s more Gossip Girl than Gershwin. Doubtless, there will be those who decry Luhrmann’s audacity. But the trailer suggests that he has remained faithful to the book’s core themes: the transience of prosperity, that money is simultaneously everything and nothing, the dangers of

‘Rule Britannia’ When Britain first, at Heaven’s command,     Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land,     And guardian angels sung this strain:  ‘Rule, Britannia, rule the waves;  Britons never will be slaves.’ The nations, not so blest as thee     Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free,     The dread and envy of them all.  ‘Rule’ etc. Still more majestic shalt thou rise,     More dreadful from each foreign stroke; As the loud blast that tears the skies     Serves but to root thy native oak.  ‘Rule’ etc. Thee haughty tyrants ne’er shall tame;     All

Before we begin, Paul Durcan produces a piece of paper. 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

‘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