Journalism

Before embarking on this book, Jeremy Lewis was told by his friend Diana Athill that his subject, the newspaper editor and philanthropist David Astor, was too ‘saintly’ for a lively biography. As a publisher, she had worked on an earlier authorised tome, and thought she knew. Lewis, and Astor, proved more resilient. There are always column inches in a well-connected plutocratic clan such as the Astors. And Astor’s mother, Virginia-born Nancy, was the gold-plated battle-axe who made Cliveden, the family house in Buckinghamshire, the centre of 1930s appeasement. The story is really how Astor (born in 1912) took on his Christian Scientist mother, threw off the trappings of privilege, and

Our newsagents are about to get a little duller: the Independent is no more – at least, not the print edition. I know that, in this brave new digital world of ours, we’re not supposed to equate the end of print with the death of a title. But it’s certainly the end of an era. The Independent is what brought me into journalism: I started reading it when it was set up, and was hooked pretty quickly. My first journalistic heroes—Andrew Marr and Neal Ascherson—wrote for its pages. A friend bought me Paper Dreams, Stephen Glover’s story of the Independent, for my 20th birthday. I had no friends or relatives

The much-lamented journalist and bon viveur Sam White, late of the rue du Bac, The Spectator and the Evening Standard, who lived in Paris for over 40 years, once wrote an affectionate portrait of his adopted home that opened with the defiant words, ‘Yes: I like it here.’ As a short review of the city it was perfect. Longer accounts that say less are published every year and must run by now into thousands of volumes. A glance at the map shows why Paris — ‘most sublime of cities’, as Luc Sante terms it — continues to attract such devotion. There is the twisting shape of the river, cutting the

Often, Christmas is a time for moaning after the night before, when the seasonal drinking is remembered (if remembered at all) with bewilderment and a degree of guilt. The illusion of drink-fuelled happiness — what James Joyce called ‘tighteousness’ — is familiar to most of us, even if the hangover seems a cruel price. The most effective remedy for a thumping head is to take a hair of the dog that bit you. Eddie Condon, the jazzman, recommended two quarts of bourbon; Samuel Taylor Coleridge swore by a breakfast of laudanum and fried eggs. By rights, the hangover should curb further drinking. Nobody wants to see their tongue pale and

This is a thriller, a novel of betrayal and separation, and a reverie on death and grieving. The only key fact I can provide without giving away the plot is that Caroline, the film-making wife of Michael, the novel’s main protagonist, is killed in the badlands of Pakistan by a drone controlled from a facility near Las Vegas. Caroline is filming Taleban leaders when they and Caroline are killed. Michael, who is ‘an immersive journalist’, has spent some years on a project with gangs in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It is dangerous but rewarding work, and after a few years his findings are published to some acclaim under

Paradise City, Elizabeth Day’s third novel, comes with an accompanying essay on The Pool — an online magazine for the Instagram, iPhone woman. Day, a feature writer for the Observer, discusses the novel’s male protagonist (you couldn’t call him hero) Sir Howard Pink, an East End Jewish boy turned rag-trade multimillionaire. Day urges women to stop being so self-effacing, people-pleasing, and permanently apologetic and instead to ‘Be More Howard’. ‘He sprung on to the page as unashamedly male and blessed with a defiant sense of his own entitlement,’ she writes. ‘He saw money, sex and power as his due. He took what he could, where he could get it and

Edward Thomas was gloomy as Eeyore. In 1906 he complained to a friend that his writing ‘was suffering more & more from a silly but unavoidable nervous interest in the children’s movement in and out of the house’. The following year, he noted, I have no ‘interests’ at all, and marriage, he said, is ‘continually encrusting the soul’. To be fair, his life was a torment — depression, worrying about and writing for money, a miserable marriage — and perhaps most cruel of all he was denied the comfort we have, as later readers, of knowing that it will all turn out all right in the end. His was a

Lesley Blanch (1904–2007) will be remembered chiefly for her gloriously extravagant The Wilder Shores of Love, the story of four upper-class European ladies who abandoned their natural habitat to seek and find romance in the Middle East. If one had to pick only one of Blanch’s books to read there could be no better choice than this; but, as this exotic potpourri reminds one, she was incapable of writing boringly or badly. The most substantial part of Lesley Blanch: On the Wilder Shores of Love (a title which seems designed to deceive putative readers into thinking that they have read it all before) is Blanch’s record of her youth —

Following his beginnings as a science-fiction horror director, David Cronenberg has spent the past decades transforming himself into one of cinema’s most literary filmmakers. He has adapted for the screen — often brilliantly — novels by J.G. Ballard, William Burroughs and Don DeLillo. In each, he has paraded his obsession with lurid mutations in human form wrought by technology, disease and the imagination. In Crash (1996), he had bodies melding with machinery. In Naked Lunch (1991), he had bodies melding with insects — plus insects melding with typewriters. Most memorably, in his biggest commercial success, The Fly (1986), he had Jeff Goldblum melding with a housefly — after Goldblum’s scientist,