Book Reviews

Andrew Motion has joined the chorus of disapproval against this year’s Booker shortlist, saying that it has created a “false divide” between highbrow literature and accessible books. He went on to describe the split as a “pernicious and dangerous thing”, adding that it was “extraordinary” that authors like Graham Swift, Alan Hollingshurst, Edward St. Aubyn and Philip Hensher had not been shortlisted.    Stern stuff from the former Poet Laureate, who was chief Booker judge last year. His words will further inspire those who think that a new prize should be created, one that recognises an “uncompromising standard of excellence”. Those are the words of Andrew Kidd, the literary agent who is the spokesman

As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been like to belong to Watts’s set at Freshwater Bay on the Isle of Wight in the 1860s. It’s difficult to know what to make of G.F. Watts. As an artist he was, indeed is, much admired. Hope: World Icon (1885-6), a delicate rendering of a blindfolded lyre-player probably remains his best-known work, prized across the

It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey. At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen.  Last night its bells tolled to the sound of Martin Bell reciting from his new book of light-tongued but ominous verse (he prefers to call it ‘verse’ than ‘poetry’), For Whom the Bell Tolls.   ‘The Man in the White Suit’ is sitting in his dressing room prior to his Guildford talk dressed, predictably, in his ‘white suit’, which is

It’s easy to blame the Americans, but sometimes — as the courts ruled in Perugia last week — they’re innocent. The case brought to mind another instance of injustice meted out to our transatlantic cousins, all in the name of that most exacting of mistresses: grammar. Of the many linguistic crimes we’ve accused them of committing, the most awful is the genocide of the suffix “ise”. We tut over spell-check, remark on the aesthetic superiority of that line of beauty — the curve of an “S” — and stand aghast at the cheek of attempting to deface their mother tongue. Replace the elegant slip of an “ise” with a clunky

What’s it about? The Great Crash of 2008 inspired a glut of books aiming to demystify the credit crunch for the financially illiterate. Michael Lewis’ Boomerang attempts to do the same for this new Eurozone crisis. Based on articles he wrote for Vanity Fair, the book is a whistlestop tour through Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Germany and California. Who is Michael Lewis? A former bond trader turned financial journalist, Michael Lewis specialises in explaining complex financial matters in an accessible and funny way. The American author’s last book was credit crunch primer The Big Short. Does he have any insights? This is more a collage of colourful reportage than a book

What’s the future for the footnote? Seems a strange question to ask about such an antiquated device. But modern technology, I think, could see a renaissance for that tricky little beast lurking at the bottom of the page. The thought has occurred because I’m currently reading one of those books (a real one, that is, a “dead tree” version) whose footnotes are all at the end, rather than on the page they relate to. Annoying, because each time you reach one you have to flick forward a couple of hundred pages. Most of the notes, it’s true, are just source citations, giving no additional information. But the odd one is