Gstaad Joan Didion, who died last December, took herself extremely seriously. American writers tend to do that, especially those whose books are unreadable, the kind who win prizes and get reviewed by the Bagel Times. Pretension aside, however, Didion was a hell of a writer, a stylist who modelled her prose on Papa Hemingway’s.
Harley Granville-Barker, actor, director, playwright, manager and critic, was a pasha of the Edwardian London stage. As a director, his Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1914 was a theatrical landmark. His own plays were provocative and controversial. The Secret Life, for example, was an analysis of the torpor of the British ruling classes. Waste, involving a
After an incredible 13 emails, Vodafone decided that I was who I was claiming to be, and refunded my money. I’m still not sure where my phone disappeared to, or whether it is coming back. They did not offer any explanation for why I bought a phone in their store in Guildford, got it home,
Last week brought the news that some universities have attached more ‘trigger warnings’ to certain books, concerned that students may find their contents offensive and upsetting. No, we’re not talking about Lolita, American Psycho or The 120 Days of Sodom. The works judged too disturbing for young people of a sensitive disposition include Oliver Twist,
Q. My husband and I have made friends with two distinguished, although fairly eccentric, writers whose company we thoroughly enjoy. However when we go to stay with them in their large London house they give us rather too many jobs to do. Of course we don’t mind helping out with food preparation, dishwashers, laying tables
The larger islands of the Mediterranean all have their glories. Fought over for millennia, they now seem to have attained stability as part of the post-1945 political order, but the records of the long epochs of conflict are among the most fascinating aspects of European history. The successive waves of conquest have left material to
‘More to my taste is Trockenbeerenkapitalismus,’ said my husband with an intonation that indicated a joke. The joke was a play on the German Spätkapitalismus, ‘late capitalism’. There is also a German wine category called Spätlese, ‘late harvest’, and another, when the grapes are exposed to noble rot and allowed to wither on the vine,
The heatwaves that would have filled my tubs and cones never came. ‘O sole mio’ falling flat as I drove through my hard fought for patch on the outskirts of Aldershot. The Whitby Morrison will have to go, it won’t fetch much, mouths to feed, another on the way and barely enough to stretch to
From The Years (Arc Publications, £8) I came to tend – I lie – to visit the grave of a friend and found an ugly shrub with waxy leaves had made the plot its home. Since my last attendance ten years had passed – doing I can’t think what, except translate a
The place was out beyond an old farmhouse, a path through woods, a clearing, sky; the others gathered close, bounded by what each of us withstood. The limestone scree tumbled down the hillside intermittently, clouds covered the sun. I shook the crushed femur and fibula of peppered ashes, watched them weightless glide like spores, and
In Jake’s Thing, Kingsley Amis gave it a name: he called it ‘the inverted pyramid of piss’: ‘One of [Geoffrey Mabbott’s] specialities was the inverted pyramid of piss, a great parcel of attitudes, rules and catchwords resting on one tiny (if you looked long and hard enough) point. Thus it was established beyond any real
The engine wasn’t what it was, they said. At ten years old the spark that had once made him a champion was flickering only intermittently at best. The fire in his belly had gone out. There had been five runs since his last victory and when Paisley Park, a horse who once nearly died of
