Death

Our unrelenting appetite for historical drama is fed by a ceaseless stream of novels and dramatisations – usually, these days, something to do with those naughty Tudors. Perhaps it is how my generation, dosed on pick n’ mix modules and special options (Industrial Revolution or Origins of WW1 anyone?), recovers lost ground. But it is unmediated history taken straight from the page that gives the real jolt. I recently acquired for the Bodleian a journal kept from 1813-1818 by the engraver and antiquary James Basire (1769-1822). His father was the more famous artist, closely associated with William Blake.  Nevertheless, the journal seemed worth having for all the right academic reasons.

Faced with a book as simple and true as Stoner, it’s easy to fall into the trap of intentional fallacy. It is the portrait of a quiet farm boy, who receives his Doctorate of Philosophy, teaches literature at the University of Missouri, then dies at the age of sixty-five. His colleagues hold him in no particular esteem. We know all this from the first page. This story of hard graft without recognition, gratifyingly, for literary sleuths, has parallels with the author’s life and the reception of his work. John Williams’ grandparents were farmers and, after completing his PhD in Missouri, he taught at the University of Denver for the following

Clive James was a recurring presence in last weekend’s literary press. There was, I regret to say, a valedictory feel to the coverage. Robert McCrum, of the Guardian, was not so much suggestive as openly morbid: ‘If word of his death has been exaggerated, there’s no question, on meeting him, that he’s into injury time, with a nagging cough that punctuates our conversation.’ If those words and others like them made little impact on the reader, then the photograph of James that illustrates McCrum’s interview might. Old age looks no fun; serious illness even less so. But, James’ spirit does not seem to have been shaken by the indignities visited upon

This subtle, mournful book is many things. It is a diary of three weeks spent, during the tense winter before the outburst of the Arab Spring, in off-season Alexandria, where nothing comes ‘except birds to the lake, most of them when they have lost their way’. It is also a series of fragments rescued from Peter Stothard’s rich life as Essex schoolboy, Oxford student, Times editor and lifelong classicist. Another part, but only a small one, is a history of Cleopatra — and the story of Stothard’s seven previous, failed attempts to write about her. Classical scholars, however, will recognise this book for what it really is. The poets of

‘My friend and I were working out how many more books we’ll read before we die,’ a customer said to me in the bookshop, the other day. ‘We read a book every couple of weeks, so we figured around 500.’ I rapidly did the maths. Twenty years. It seemed a little pessimistic for someone who can’t have been much older than fifty. Those of you who feel inspired to do your own calculations might feel depressed by how few books you’ve got left, or overwhelmed by how many you’ve yet to read. At 29 years old, I’m not so far from the beginning of my reading life and it feels

The salubrious surroundings of the Waldorf Hotel seem like a very apt setting to interview a master of style and sophistication. When I arrive in the lobby, John Banville is nowhere to be seen. Peeping into the bar, I notice a grey haired man with a moustache, wearing a tuxedo, softly playing a grand piano. Taking a seat, this strikes me as the kind of place that Alex Cleave would enjoy a drink. Alex is a semi-retired actor, and the central protagonist and narrator of Ancient Light; a novel that recalls a passionate love affair that took place over fifty years ago. The object of Alex’s desire was Mrs Gray,

from Delia When winter snows upon thy golden hairs, And frost of age hath nipped thy flowers near; When dark shall seem thy day that never clears, And all lies withered that was held so dear;    Then take this picture which I here present thee, Limned with a pencil not all unworthy; Here see the gifts that God and Nature lent thee; Here read thyself, and what I suffered for thee.    This may remain thy lasting monument, Which happily posterity may cherish; These colours with thy fading are not spent; These may remain, when thou and I shall perish.    If they remain, then thou shalt live thereby;

Shall We Gather At The River is a book of unfortunate endings — the stories of nine suicides hang from a plot-line that tells of a freak flood in the small Irish town of Murn. Fittingly for a book preoccupied with endings, we begin at the end: our hero, Enoch O’Reilly, is sitting in his father’s basement and staring down the barrel of a gun. The narrative then leaps backwards by 28 years to give us Enoch as a child in that same basement, stumbling upon his father’s old radio equipment and finding, in that forbidden room, a radio that channels an Old Testament sermon delivered in such rousing style

From ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds; Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many

If you have five minutes to spare this evening, read Teju Cole’s account of meeting V.S. Naipaul. Writing from the covetable position of a column in the hallowed New Yorker, Cole is man enough to admit feeling awkward when he meets Naipaul, and, worse still, when he is addressed by him as an equal. It’s a winning approach, candid rather than lovey, and both men emerge well from it. Cole’s portrait of Naipaul is intriguing. Cole is not an unthinking admirer: he acknowledges that Naipaul has been ‘so fond of the word “nigger,” so aggressive in his lack of sympathy towards Africa, so brutal in his treatment of women.’ He appears to

It is lit-fiction season: that time of the year of when the premier novelists of the age dominate the market. Ian McEwan, Pat Barker, Zadie Smith, Sebastian Faulks and Rose Tremain all have new books out, and Salman Rushdie’s much anticipated memoirs are to be launched this week, so many newspapers are devoting themselves to regurgitating stale observations about The Satanic Verses ahead of the main and keenly guarded event. Of the new books, Zadie Smith’s NW is garnering the most plaudits, or at least that seems to be the case. Philip Hensher awarded the ‘rich and varied’ book 5 stars in his Telegraph review, marking the ‘virtuosity of Smith’s technique’

John Banville’s reputation as a master stylist and serious novelist wasn’t done any harm by the weekend reviews for his latest book Ancient Light. Familiar riffs on his usual leitmotifs guaranteed the standard standing ovation. ‘It is written in Banville’s customary prose, rhythmic and allusive and dense with suggestive imagery,’ Alex Clarke commended in the Guardian. While Patricia Craig in the Independent applauded that: ‘Many of John Banville’s customary concerns are present in this bedazzling new novel: memory and invention, questions of identity and make-believe, names and aliases, transgressions and transformations’. More unexpected however — given the rather dour face he sports for photo-ops – was his rather fun interview