Book Reviews

Jarvis Cocker on Writing and Publishing his Lyrics from FaberBooks on Vimeo. Faber&Faber’s excellent The Thought Fox blog carries an interview with Jarvis Cocker on how to write lyrics. The key, it seems, is to record the mundane, especially if it happens in Sheffield; although I suspect you need more than a pair of horn rimmed glasses and a bad dress sense to pull it off. Cocker also draws an interesting distinction between reading lyrics and hearing them. The sleeves on Pulp records carry a warning that the lyrics are not to be read separately from the song because the rhythm of the music is integral to the words. “They

As I came to the end of my English degree I applied to several universities for further study on Joseph Conrad, along with UEA for their creative writing programme. Owing to a misunderstanding with my tutor her reference arrived at East Anglia late and I was told my application would be deferred to the following year. Like many graduands I’d enjoyed university, enjoyed my English degree and believed that further study would be every bit as intellectually and socially stimulating. However, over the summer I began to have my doubts. I was going to do a Masters by Research and increasingly realized that being in a strange city, without the

At the end of last month, the British Library signed a deal with Google to digitise 40 million pages from its collection. Today, Tristram Hunt has written a piece in the Guardian welcoming the change, but saying that, when it comes to history, it’s best to dirty your hands in an archive. He has set Twitter-tongues wagging, with critics branding him an intellectual snob and worse. It’s quite a storm; but, Hunt and his detractors seem to be talking at crossed purposes. Hunt is right: I took a History degree and throughout my studies nothing matched pulling on some protective gloves, donning a face mask and digging around in a

Sticky at Christmas, packed in serried rows around a plastic twig in an oval-ended paper-wrapped box with a picture of a camel train; dates in childhood were exotic. The mystery words Deglet Noor were as sweet to roll around the mouth as the fibrous fruit. But we learn from Dates – A Global History by Nawal Nasrallah (Reaktion Books, £9.99) that they are a staple food, comparable to wheat, potatoes and rice. The Edible Series focuses on one foodstuff per book. The result can be like an answer in a Chinese exam where everything known is written down, here in a prose style reminiscent of Wikipedia. Fortunately, pictures are a

Fay Maschler has written the Bookends column in this week’s magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. Sticky at Christmas, packed in serried rows around a plastic twig in an oval-ended paper-wrapped box with a picture of a camel train; dates in childhood were exotic. The mystery words Deglet Noor were as sweet to roll around the mouth as the fibrous fruit. But we learn from Dates – A Global History by Nawal Nasrallah that they are a staple food, comparable to wheat, potatoes and rice. The Edible Series focuses on one foodstuff per book. The result can be like an answer in a Chinese exam where everything

The Booktrust has cancelled the John Llewellyn Rhys prize this year because it is suffering a ‘lack of funds’. £13m was cut from the Booktrust’s annual grant from the Department of Education was cut earlier in the year and the organisation has been forced into retrenchment. Now, it is a pity that this widely respected prize will not be awarded this year. It is a favourite among the literati, many of whom owe their success to it. Margaret Drabble reveals in today’s Guardian that she would not have been introduced to the ‘London literary scene without the JLR’ and she labels it the ‘Booker without the back-stabbing’. Contemporary literature is,

Book reviewers are, on the whole, a polite bunch, and rarely say what they really think. Instead they use a clever code, whereby “her most experimental novel yet” means “an utter mess”, “exhaustive and scholarly” = “I fell asleep”, “draws heavily on previous studies” = “the scoundrel has copied and pasted his entire book”, and so on.      Occasionally, however, a critic will lose it, and bludgeon their victim so violently they can only be identified by dental records. We love it when this happens, which is why we’ve rounded up this month’s best hatchet jobs: Rod Liddle (Sunday Times) on Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class by

Writer Giles Milton talks to Daisy Dunn about the relative who inspired both his family’s artistic passions and the narrative of his most recent book, Wolfram: The Boy who went to War, reviewed in the Spectator last month by Hester Vaizey. You note that the book grew out of many hours of interviews.  How long did the process take, and how did the book develop? It was quite a long process in getting my father-in-law, Wolfram, to talk about the War. He never spoke about his time in the Third Reich and during the whole Hitler period. I always wondered what he did, but that’s not really a question you