Book Reviews

How would the newspapers have reacted if Osama bin Laden had been killed on the same day as the Royal Wedding? No doubt tragedy would have ensued as 1,000 despairing picture editors hurled themselves into the sea. I’m glad the two events didn’t coincide, not least because the death of the military historian Professor Richard Holmes would have passed unnoticed. Many will remember Holmes’ clipped speech and solemn manner on television as he strode around the slopes of Waterloo or the Somme, relating past events with a singularly engaging zeal. But Holmes was more than just a TV historian, a phrase imbued with pejorative overtones. He was a revered academic

How would you behave if you were at the Royal wedding? I concede that at this stage the contingency is remote, but humour me anyway. It’s a grand sight, the sort of pageant that Britain does best. The royal family, bishops, assembled dignitaries, guardsmen lining the route: all that’s missing is a Spitfire, Vera Lynn and some fleeing Bosche. But Huw Edwards and some bearskins does not a state occasion make. The wedding will look splendid and solemn, but, once the religious ceremony ends, it’s like any other familial knees-up. So was it ever thus. The Gentleman’s Magazine, a staple of polite Georgian England, considered this question of deportment in

It is an old cliché that films of books must be inferior to the books themselves. It is not always true. For instance, read Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park and see whether you disagree (the writing is pedestrian and the plotting is incoherent, which is why the movie has a different storyline). Then of course there is David Nicholls’ first novel, Starter For Ten, which was fun but nothing like as good as the film adaptation (in no small part thanks to James McAvoy). The adaptation of David Nicholls’ One Day, a coming-of-age novel about love and fulfilment, hits our cinema screens this autumn. But clichés are not clichés for nothing.

As Roy Greenslade notes, the Orwell Prize aims to reward those who have come closest to achieving Orwell’s ambition of ‘making political writing an art’. The Orwell Prize’s shortlist has been released today. Shortlist is something of a misnomer, as a glance at the exhaustive categories will reveal. Perhaps, in time, there will be a Twitter prize. The major category is the book prize. The shortlist is impressive: Helen Dunmore’s The Betrayal, an exploration of Stalin’s Russia after the Second World War. The late Lord Bingham’s The Rule of Law, a masterful examination of the balance of law in Britain and strangely humane and uplifting for such a theoretically considered

In recent years the question of why the literary mainstream continues to marginalize and ignore writers of Science Fiction and Fantasy has become a live issue, perhaps most eloquently demonstrated by the furious reaction to the BBC’s shabby and offhand treatment of the genres in its World Book Night program, The Books We Really Read. As someone who reads widely in both fields it’s an irritation I have some sympathy with. Where forty years ago any reader worth their salt would have at least a passing knowledge of SF authors such as J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss and Ursula Le Guin, many now wear their ignorance of the form proudly, dismissing