Book Reviews

It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned for an audio book, but as Maxim Jakubowski, the editor of The Sounds of Crime tells us in a pre-thrill talk, he ‘begged’ the five writers he considered to be the best in their field to produce a new story for this collection; and ‘happily for me,’ he tells us, ‘they all agreed.’ Jakubowski’s introduction evokes those black-and-white days when Alfred Hitchcock shuffled on to millions of walnut-encased television sets to present us with half an hour of spine-tingling tension — very much as we have with each of the stories here. It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned

Here is the latest Bookends column from this week’s issue of the Spectator: The Poor Little Rich Girl memoir, popular for at least a century, nowadays slums it in the misery department. ‘One particularly annoying aspect of being sexually abused or traumatised as a child,’ writes Ivana Lowell in Why not Say what Happened? (Bloomsbury, £25), ‘is that everyone wants you to talk about it.’ Does she mean ‘everyone’, or just her agent, publisher and ‘many psychiatrists’? Ivana Lowell is third-generation PLRG: daughter of Caroline Blackwood, doomy muse of Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, and author of pitilessly miserable fiction; granddaughter of the 4th Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (as

Last week was Shelley, here’s this week’s Discovering Poetry excerpt: Now I’d be willing to wage at least a fiver that in the last twenty-four hours you passed on the street a nice young couple walking happily hand-in-hand. Nauseating, isn’t it? But also the most natural thing in the world. There seems to me something very touching about such modest affection. Little in itself, but enough to mean the world when done rightly. Between lovers, between a mother and her child, or in the softly squeezed hand of a friend in grief. It’s with this most everyday act of human love that Milton ends Paradise Lost. As Adam and Eve

Alas, Gordon Brown’s Beyond the Crash was just too late to qualify for this month’s Spectator Book Club book of the month. What a sadness. Instead, I’ve picked a book to inspire goodwill in all men: Lucky Jim. The Spectator originally described Kingsley Amis’ campus classic as ‘that rarest of rare good things, a very funny book’. The general anger that Amis expressed has dissipated into apathy – nowadays it’s the students who feel exercised. But Amis’ craft – the wicked set-pieces, savage wit and his deft prose – remains vivid and modern. Orlando Bird’s piece on Amis’ legacy reminded me of what I’d forgotten of arguably the finest novel

A couple of years back, John Carey reviewed a new biography of Kingsley Amis and began with the question that people had been asking for years: why was he so horrible? Amis is regarded as one of a generation of fat philistines, drink-sodden and misanthropic, who made careers of bating Britain’s ‘Trots and leftist shags’. But he was not always so. John Metcalf, reviewing Lucky Jim for the Spectator in 1954, described it as ‘that rarest of rare good things: a very funny book’. ‘Dixon’, he wrote, ‘is completely believable, his predicaments and gaucheries are a part of him, and Mr Amis watches with wide-eyed objectivity’. Lucky Jim, Metcalf concluded,

‘The coalition’s proposal to slash funding for the arts…and humanities risk not just losing a generation of artists, but also a generation of critical and creative thinkers’. So says an indignant Guardian letter buttressed by a shopping list of academics. A familiar clarion call. But surprise, surprise what unites the subjects threatened with impoverishment? Books. It all, in the end, comes back to books. No matter how celebrated the lecturer, no matter how state-of-the-art the facilities, no matter how revolutionary and innovative the course, arts and humanities degrees at least are all about books.      Lectures are little more than a splash and a skim through material, a verbal

This article was originally published on the Spectator’s Cappuccino Culture blog. It is republished here because it relates to last week’s episode of the gripping if smaltzy adaptation of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart, the story of one writer’s journey through the twentieth century. The second episode begins with the outbreak of the Second World War, the party interrupted. It airs at 9pm tonight on Channel Four. Without need of an occupation, a small band of the well-born lit up the 1920s with mischief and indolence. The last of their number, Teresa Jungman, died aged 102. Many of the dilettante Bright Young Things went on to ‘Great Things’ – William