Writing

When I was told that a newspaper had asked someone to write my obituary, my first instinct was excitement. I’m not easily offended and I’ve always been an attention-seeker. Once, when I was fat, a magazine printed a photograph of Jabba the Hutt and said it was me. I cut it out and pinned it on the wall above my typewriter with other images that inspired and amused me. Another time, when I was doing loads of drugs, I made it on to an online Death List of the ten public figures most likely to turn their toes up in the near future; again, I found this highly entertaining, and

It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the past 40 years, though, September has been for me a different season: the time of the publishers’ launch party. These used to be lavish affairs, held in a hotel or gallery with themed drinks and food, the whole thing fizzing with romantic possibilities. In 2001 we had a memorable do for my American novel On

Amid the hullabaloo attending the 150th anniversary of the birth of John Buchan on 26 August – the walks and talks, the screenings of The 39 Steps, the think pieces in elevated publications, the new collection of essays – one facet of his extraordinary life is unlikely to get much of an airing. I am thinking of his work for The Spectator, little known now, yet crucial to his development as a writer. In early 1900, The Spectator was enjoying success as a readable Liberal Unionist, free trade, anti-Home Rule, political and literary magazine, popular with educated opinion-formers of a mildly conservative bent. It was owned and edited by John

After one of Jeffrey Archer’s minor tangles with the absolute truth, his friend the late Barry Humphries remarked: ‘We all invent ourselves to some degree. It’s just that Jeffrey has taken it a little further than most.’ The remark came to mind last week as the media storm over the veracity (or otherwise) of the Winns’ account in The Salt Path reached its peak. As Dame Edna might have said, all travel writing is invented to some degree. It’s just that Raynor and Moth may have taken it a little further than most. ‘In Patagonia?’ Bruce Chatwin’s lodger is said to have remarked of the eponymous book. ‘I doubt Bruce

Over a hotel breakfast in Brisbane, I showed Sir Alan Hollinghurst my injuries. We’d met the previous week at the Auckland Writers’ Festival and would meet again, post-Brisbane, at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. A book tour of Australia and New Zealand is a bit like being in a David Lodge novel – writers are more likely to travel halfway round the world if a few potentially sizeable crowds are waiting for them. A.C. Grayling, who I broke bread with in Auckland and saw again in Sydney, seemed to have scored the most palpable hit by being invited to be philosopher-in-residence at a festival in Margaret River, centre of Australia’s most

I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good riddance to literary fiction’, I agree with. It’s true that the high-flown heavy hitters of the book biz get far less attention than in yesteryear – though ‘litfic’ has never been a big money-maker in publishing. It’s true that no one reads book reviews any longer, and I should know because I write book reviews. I’ve no use for fiction exclusively powered by plot. If the words are flat and lifeless, I can’t read the book It’s true, too, that literary prizes don’t trigger the massive surge in sales they

A good place to catch the highbrow sports journalist in action is the ‘Pseuds Corner’ column of PrivateEye, where he (and it’s always a ‘he’) regularly appears. Here you will discover that to contemplate Manchester City’s mid-season loss of form is ‘like sitting in Rome in 410 and watching the Visigoths pour over the horizon’, warm to the spectacle of Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk ‘striding about the place like the 17th Earl of Egham with a quiver of pheasants over one shoulder’, or learn that the mothers of the former Everton manager Sean Dyche and the French national coach Didier Deschamps both worked in the textile industry, which may explain

Anniversaries. Back in mid-December 1998, 26 years ago to the month, we wrapped my first (and probably only) feature film as a director, The Trench. I always think about the film on 11 November, because during the shoot we observed a uniquely different minute’s silence in the labyrinth of trenches we had constructed on a soundstage at Bray Studios in Berkshire. The film follows a squad of young soldiers as they wait, over two fraught days in 1916, for the Battle of the Somme to begin. We paused filming at 11 a.m. and fell silent. I was standing in the frontline trench with a dozen young actors who were all

Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a century. We owe it to (among others) Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But what about when their work is quoted by other writers?  You’re allowed to quote only a certain proportion of a work before you need to pay the rights holder This week I published a new book in which I spend a lot of time discussing the work of other writers. The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading is a canter through children’s literature from Aesop and

The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the four winds in the wake of a corporate sell-off has stirred predictable fury among Orwell buffs. As in all the best literary rows, the contending roles seemed to be clearly defined from the outset. There were the heroes (Orwell and his many acolytes); there was a principal villain – the publisher Hachette, which had decided to unload its archive, only to find that no single bidder could meet the asking price; there was the agent of their devilry (more about him in a moment); and even some subsidiary baddies, in

For those of us lucky enough to have been regular contributors to Punch magazine, April is a slightly crueller month than most, since it was on 8 April 32 years ago that the last edition collapsed, exhausted, on to the newspaper stands. By then it was way past its best, but in its day it had employed some of the very best brains in the business, led by some of the very best editors. I was lucky enough to be around when Alan Coren was in his prime. He led the magazine from the front, literally, and set a standard that the rest of us did our hardest to emulate,

Trying to publish a book used to be straightforward. You came up with an idea, spent months, if not years, writing it, then sent it off to an agent or publisher who rejected it by return. Life was simpler back then. We all knew where we were. Rejection wasn’t necessarily based on the quality of the work. Literature is a subjective business. Lord of the Flies earned William Golding 20 rejections. James Joyce, Jack Kerouac and Joseph Heller suffered similar fates. Marcel Proust was rejected so many times that he decided to pay for publication himself. The much-repeated industry statistic is between 1 and 2 per cent of manuscripts are

I spoke too soon. Beatrix Potter, I suggested in an afterword to my 2016 biography of the author and illustrator, had escaped the distortions of sexual and racial revisionism that now blight so many eminent and long-dead British writers. But no longer. Last week a specialist in postcolonial literature at a northern university accused Potter of failing to acknowledge her indebtedness to an oral storytelling tradition of enslaved Africans working on American plantations. Welcome, please, a new Potter for the 21st century: exploitative, colonialist, dishonest. Potter’s concealment, claims Dr Emily Zobel Marshall, ‘[feeds] into a damaging and recurring appropriation of Black cultural forms that continues today’. Blimey. Zobel Marshall’s hypothesis