Our reviews of the latest in literature
A change from the usual format this week, as it is Armistice Day. This clip is taken from a documentary made in conjunction with Simon Armitage’s 2008 war collection, The Not Dead. The veteran is quoting from Armitage’s poem, ‘The Malaya Emergency’. It speaks for itself. Later today, Radio Four’s afternoon play will be devoted to Andrew Motion’s new volume of war poetry.
P.D. James has already said a great deal about her love of Austen, her love of the mystery genre and her new book Death Comes to Pemberley. She was in London earlier this evening, talking again about how her enthusiasms became manifest in a book. She is a self-effacing and hugely erudite speaker; a natural raconteur, you might say. Few authors could offer a more thoughtful analysis of the art of fiction, but the evening was memorable for her personal reminiscences. James embodies the sweep of very nearly a century of British political and cultural life. When asked to reflect on 50 years in print, she said: “England has changed.
Next off the shelf is actor Tom Hollander. He tells us what children ought to read at school, which party from literature he’d most like to attend, and that his dream is to play Victor Hugo’s most tragic hero. The first episode of the new series of ‘Rev.’, in which he stars, airs tonight at 9pm on BBC2. 1) What are you reading at the moment? London Fields, by Martin Amis 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The James Bond books 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? One Day (I know, I know) 4) You are about to
‘Christopher Hitchens in conversation with Stephen Fry’ this wasn’t — Hitchens had been struck down with pneumonia. No matter, ‘Stephen Fry and friends on the life, loves and hates of Christopher Hitchens’ at the South Bank didn’t disappoint. Sean Penn was the first to offer his memories, fittingly complete with cigarette – an irony it was unclear whether he appreciated or not. Penn praised Hitchens’ rallying against the “ultimate childishness of Henry Kissinger” reading an excerpt from The Trials of Henry Kissinger, which satellite failure cut short. Fry then welcomed Richard Dawkins onstage — the only participant who wasn’t communicating via satellite. Asked about the topic of offensiveness, he bemoaned
Do you read at mealtimes? And if so, what? The fact you’re looking at this blog in the first place leads me to believe you may be a fan of books. And while there is the odd person around who doesn’t like food, they are just that – odd. Surely most of us would agree with CS Lewis that ‘eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.’ In fact for many, having something to read when you’re eating alone is a necessity. Nothing worse than the old torture of being stuck at breakfast with only the cereal packet separating you from boredom. You try and manufacture some interest in
Literary festivals are a very big deal in India, if Vikram Seth is to be believed. Seth made an impromptu appearance at the Mumbai literary festival last week. “The whole thing was pretty chancy. I was supposed to be in England for the launch of The Rivered Earth yesterday. I was in Mumbai for the first exhibition of my sister’s works. Anil Dharker (the festival director) plucked me off the air and got me on the cheap,” he told the First Post. If Seth really delayed his return to England in favour giving a recital in the Tata Hotel, then it reveals something about his professional and personal priorities. Seth
Jane Asher is second in the hot seat. She tells us how to get children reading; who she would have a literary fling with and what exactly would make her end a friendship. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Inspired by seeing her interviewed recently, I’m catching up with Diana Athill’s collected memoirs: I’ve got to half way through ‘Instead of a Letter’. She writes so beautifully and frankly that she makes the most mundane events completely fascinating. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Sherlock Holmes; Frances Hodgson Burnett (particularly A Little Princess) and the Dimsie books by Dorita Fairlie Bruce 3) Has a
The four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible has produced some great books. Almost all aspects have been covered: the general histories of Melvyn Bragg and Gordon Campbell ranged over the politics and history, while David Crystal’s Begat showed how its idioms and phrases have percolated through our language. Now, in The Shadow of a Great Rock, Harold Bloom finishes the year by approaching the KJV as a work of art. With a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, he shuffles between the original languages and a variety of English translations — Tyndale, the Geneva Bible and the King James itself. This approach makes for one
Yesterday, American bookstore Barnes & Noble launched its latest crusade against the Kindle. At a special conference at its New York headquarters, it unveiled the ‘Nook’ tablet to a raucous fanfare. The Bookseller reports that “everything about the press conference was an aggressive counter-punch to its main rival and its tactics”. The Kindle was compared to a “vending machine”, while the Nook was said to offer customers a better service. The technology press is fairly impressed with the Nook. B&N have partnered companies like Netfix and Pandora to give users a wide choice of media, and long collaboration with technology manufacturer Foxconn, which worked on the i-Phone, has produced a screen that
Richard Bradford styled his biography of Martin Amis as ‘The biography’, an odious gesture that would tempt fate on even the busiest day. Are there any scoops? With the exception of a few mild indiscretions from Christopher Hitchens — no, there are not. Early in the piece, Bradford thanks Amis for his ‘co-operation’, which amounted to five face-to-face interviews. That spirit of co-operation dissolved into acrimony at some stage, and the publication of this book has been marred by difficulties and delays. What are the critics saying? It’s a stinker, they say as one. On these pages, Sam Leith observed that Bradford struggles to describe Amis’ writing, which is a drawback for
As Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan opens at the National Gallery, Daisy Dunn looks at his famous Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari. Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Most Eminent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects, commonly abbreviated to The Lives is not what one might expect of a history, or a biography, or an art book of any kind. Its sixteenth-century Italian audience probably found it equally genre-defying. Discursive, inaccurate, shot through with an agenda that corrupted objectivity, Vasari’s Lies, as it is often called, is nonetheless indispensible, especially to students of Leonardo da Vinci. Vasari was an artist before he was an artists’ biographer. He
The regally refurbished St. Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster hosted a party this evening in honour of Robert Hardman and his new book, Our Queen. Hardman, a veteran royal correspondent, broke from the exhausting canapés (which were inspired by George VI and the Queen Mother’s hearty wedding breakfast – lobsters, black pudding, chicken and an array of fish), to talk about his book and the monarchy. Hardman’s thesis, which he previewed in the Spectator a few weeks ago, is that the Queen has overseen the most dramatic reform of the monarchy since the French Revolution. Through extensive travel and diplomacy, she has single-handedly maintained the Commonwealth as an economic and political force for good; that achievement is now
The Man Booker committee has appointed Peter Stothard as the chairman of next year’s judges. What a dreary decision. I’ve nothing against Sir Peter Stothard; the TLS is a fine, upstanding publication — although whether it can be said to ‘zip along’ is a matter of taste. No, it’s more that in picking someone so literary establishment, so safe, they’ve shown the bullies did get to them after all. It’s like being teased at school for your pigtails, pretending you don’t care, then turning up the next day with a ponytail. Or a weak government U-turning on policy (to their credit, none of the Man Booker people has come out and
Tomorrow is E-Day: the publication of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery. The book concerns the fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and how they were still accepted even after being exposed as a fabrication in 1921. This is natural territory for Eco the semiotician. He told the Times (£): ‘I always had an interest for the problem of lying, fakes and forgeries from the semiotic point of view. It’s a fundamental human activity to lie more than to tell the truth. The problem of the Protocols fascinated me. Just because of its capability to resist any form of proof and criticism, it means that it’s a text that is
‘I have to apologise to Jane Austen for involving her beloved Elizabeth in a murder investigation but this fusion of my two enthusiasms – for the novels of Jane Austen and for writing detective stories – has given me great pleasure which I hope will be shared by my readers.’ When you’re over 90 and have received seven honorary degrees from various universities without ever having gone to university in the first place, you can do pretty much whatever you like. And if it’s prolonging the life of one of English literature’s best loved heroines, so much the better. (Especially if you’re Faber & Faber.) The astonishingly sprightly PD James
The title of Boris’s forthcoming book on the people of London claims that it is ‘the city that made the world’. Whoa back, steady on, now. Surely Boris means Rome, centre of a vast ancient empire, not to mention the worldwide Catholic Church? When the poet Martial described the opening of the Colosseum in ad 80, he observed the vast throng gathered in it and wondered if there was any race so remote, so barbarous that it was not represented — Thracians, Sarmatians (from the Danube), Britons, Arabs, Sygambrians (a German people), Ethiopians, ‘their voices a babel, yet one, when they call you, emperor, true father of the fatherland’. The
Our regular reviewers were asked to name the books they’d most enjoyed reading this year. More choices next week • A.N. Wilson Rachel Campbell-Johnson’s Mysterious Wisdom: The Life and Work of Samuel Palmer (Bloomsbury, £25) is one of those rare biographies which is a work of literature: beautifully written, overwhelmingly moving. A great art critic, with an understanding of the human heart has produced this masterpiece. It is one of the best biographies I have ever read of anyone: it captures the tragedy of Palmer’s life, and brings out the shimmering glory, the iridescent secrets of his Shoreham phase. Matthew Sturgis’s When in Rome: 2,000 Years of Roman Sightseeing (Frances
A new book by Ronald Blythe is something of an event. In recent years the bard of Akenfield has mostly published collections of articles, which makes At the Yeoman’s House (Enitharmon £15) especially welcome. It’s an autobiographical meditation on an ancient dwelling-house set in flint-strewn fields: Bottengoms Farm on the Essex-Suffolk border, where Blythe lives. He inherited it from the artist John Nash, and now investigates its history in an enjoyably oblique and fragmentary fashion. In Cobbett’s definition a yeoman was above a farmer but lower than a gentleman, and Bottengoms has never been grand. It began when ‘a man roofed in a spring and dwelt beside it’, and in
There are people sent to depress us, and prominent among them is Mark Steyn, whose speciality is apocalyptic predictions. Following his bestseller America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, which was about the collapse of all of the Western world with the exception of the United States, he is now predicting the collapse of the US as well, leaving the entire ‘free world’, as it used to be called, at the mercy of those great enemies of freedom, China and Islam. He writes: There will be no ‘new world order’, only a world without order, in which pipsqueak failed states go nuclear while the planet’s wealthiest
Penelope Lively’s new novel traces the consequences of a London street mugging. As the culprit sprints away with a handbag, the victim, Charlotte, a retired widow, falls and cracks her hip. Her daughter, Rose, personal assistant to the once-eminent historian Lord Peters, is meant to be in Manchester to help her employer give a talk on Walpole. When Rose bails out, Peters turns to his own daughter, Marion, an interior designer in hock to the bank. At the pre-talk lunch, she has the good fortune, so it seems, to meet a venture capitalist, who offers her a gig doing up luxury flats. Less fortunate is her married lover, Jeremy, whose