Kingsley amis

Friday

Charlotte Hobson

We had so many books we had to hire a structural engineer to prevent us being buried

My father Anthony Hobson, whose books are to be sold at Christie’s in two sales next week, claimed that the book collector’s greatest joy was the sight of an empty shelf: a vacuum begging to be filled. Such a thing was a rare occurrence in our home, so freighted with literary matter, mainly upstairs, that the advice of a structural engineer had to be sought: were we all about to be buried beneath an avalanche of bibliographical rarities? On the landing stood the vast tomes on Renaissance book binding, my father’s lifelong study – serried dark objects stamped with words that sounded to my young self like spells: Sigismondo Boldoni,

Thursday

Steerpike

The fat debate – Julie Burchill vs Katie Hopkins

In this week’s issue, Julie Burchill explains why she is not dieting. Ever. As Kingsley Amis said, no pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in a geriatric home. And Burchill has seen nothing during her long, wicked, wonderful life to make her change her ways — or her weight. But what will Katie Hopkins, arch-enemy of the obese, make of this? She joins Burchill on this week’s View from 22 podcast, to discuss whether someone can ever be overweight and happy. Hopkins has campaigned vigorously against obesity — so does she think Burchill is greedy when she goes off to ‘have another cream doughnut’, as Hopkins puts it? Burchill doesn’t seem too bothered by what Hopkins thinks. She reckons

Thursday

Molly Guinness

Lolita’s secret revenge mission, and other daft theories of literary spite

Richard Bradford has written more than 20 books of literary criticism and biography. This latest one is a compendium of writers’ feuds and resentments. Reading Literary Rivals is a curious experience; from the quotations and bare facts you can just about make out a version of reality, but it’s fighting so hard against the author’s interpretations that it’s sometimes obscured altogether. It feels as if Bradford has done his research with a baleful monocle pressed to his eye, giving a ghastly pallor to everything he reads. When Dickens read Thackeray’s review of his work, he wrote to thank him, but when Professor Bradford read the same review, he saw nothing

Thursday

Mark Amory

Mark Amory’s diary: Confessions of a literary editor

Until recently I used to claim that I had been literary editor of The Spectator for over 25 years; now I say almost 30. The trouble is I am not quite sure and it is curiously difficult to find out. Dot Wordsworth arrived on the same day as me but she cannot remember either. Each of us assumed that the other was an established figure and so our superior. A similar imprecision may undermine other memories. In the early Eighties then, when Alexander Chancellor had reinvented the magazine after a bad patch, and it seemed daring, anarchic and slightly amateurish, I wrote theatre reviews and one late afternoon went round

Thursday

Peter J. Conradi

The biography that makes Philip Larkin human again

How does Philip Larkin’s gloom retain such power to disturb? His bleakest verses have the quality of direct address, as if a poetical Eeyore were protesting directly into our ear. ‘Aubade’, his haunting night-time meditation on the terrors of death and dying, focuses on ‘the sure extinction that we travel to/ And shall be lost in always’ and offers no consolation. His ‘Next Please’ makes grim fun out of our habit of hope, pictured as a ship we expect to greet us with its full cargo of rewards. But of course ‘Only one ship is seeking us, a black-/Sailed unfamiliar….’ He saw religious faith as a form of self-deception. Moreover,

Thursday

Charles Moore

Mugabe envy in Scotland

Who owns Scotland? The people who most commonly ask this question believe that the land has been wrested from ordinary Scots by evil lairds and rich foreigners (by which they chiefly mean the English). Now the Scottish government is bringing out a report on how to correct this alleged injustice. It may recommend extending community ‘right to buy’ powers and allowing tenants to buy their holdings even if the owners do not want to sell.  This would have the unintended effect of ending all new tenancies. But the SNP’s misunderstanding of the situation is even more radical than that. It believes that big Scottish landowners are rich because they own

Saturday

Nik Darlington

Wine and The Spectator: how little has changed since 1860

What are the big themes in wine today? High rates of duty loom large, as does their impact on prices. There are some concerns for consumption, but no one seems too keen to keep a lid on it (not least among the Fourth Estate). Discovering the next big thing becomes ever more competitive as the wine world expands too; and we are (rightly) living through a fetish for rare grape varieties. The bravura new Spectator Archive, cataloguing every magazine from 1828 till 2008, tells us little has changed. Wine duty was a hot topic in Victorian times. In March 1860, a correspondent wrote: ‘Of all the articles in the long

Saturday

Philip Hensher

Flouting all those pieties

If not equal to his best novels, Kingsley Amis’s short stories are still wonderfully entertaining, says Philip Hensher Some writers of short fiction — there doesn’t seem to be a noun to parallel ‘novelist’ — are dedicated craftsmen, like Chekhov, Kipling, William Trevor, Alice Munro or V.S. Pritchett. Others, like Evelyn Waugh or E.M. Forster, are more haphazard, producing stories to commission, or as a sketch, to try something out in moments when an idea on a small scale seems to be all that inspiration can supply. The result, when the collected edition finally surfaces, is generally more varied in surface than the works of the specialist — just think