Book Reviews

I have never been more chilled, thrilled, shocked and excited — and from a literary point of view, nothing has made me feel more inadequate as a writer — than when reading the opening to Great Expectations, which is one of the finest passages I’ve ever come across. Screen adaptations can’t quite capture the atmosphere because the writing frees the imagination; it’s terribly difficult to do, and you often lose the beauty of the words. That is the passage for me. Saul David is a military historian of Victorian Britain The entrance of Magwitch Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the

It was National Library Day on Saturday, and the Save Kensal Rise Library campaigners continued their vigil, guarding the library from closure. They have been dealt a blow this morning by the Court of Appeal, which has denied them leave to appeal to the Supreme Court following the defeat of their case last December. The Court of Appeal’s original judgment gave the campaigners one glimmer of hope that remains alight. It noted that the local council, Labour controlled Brent, could ‘bear a share’ of keeping Kensal Rise Library open without incurring costs by allowing volunteers to run the library. The campaigners urge the council to ‘preserve this vital local resource’

Jonathan Franzen has made the news this week, by berating digital media and corporate capitalism. Those were themes of his most recent novel, Freedom. His previous book, The Corrections, played with the fashionable phrase ‘dysfunctional family’, and exposed how the term has been bastardised by misuse. He re-emphasises that final point in the clip above. The abuse of language and the prevalence of bad writing exercises most writers, especially the good ones. VS Naipaul and Martin Amis, for instance, are severe on the subject. Naipaul advises those who misuse words to ‘look for other work’, while the content of Amis’ The War Against Cliché is arch: this sentence on Cervantes is merciless, ‘While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote

Video killed the radio star, sang the Buggles in 1979 — assuming the synth-pop Buggles actually sang. In the same year, Mark Amory was putting the finishing touches to a collection of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. He noted in his introduction that letters were an antique curiosity; no one writes them anymore, he wrote. That grave prognosis was a tad premature. Diana Athill’s recent epistlatory memoir, Instead of a Letter, suggests that men of letters still live up to their name. Then again, Athill is 93. The telephone gave letter-writing a nagging cold, which email has turned into pneumonia. The letter’s admirers have leapt to help. The Guardian reports that Dave Eggers has joined

Mark Mason, author of Walk the Lines, is in the hot seat this week. He tells us that no woman is truly attractive unless you can imagine going to the pub with her, and admits to a fear that he may be one of Holden Caulfield’s ‘phonies’. 1) What are you reading at the moment?  Bob Woodward’s biography of John Belushi. Yes, that Bob Woodward. Strange choice of subject for the man who brought down Nixon (as Woodward himself admits) – but it’s a great read. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Agatha Christie. Once boasted to my mother that I’d been awake until 4am