'Babble', by Charles Saatchi

Once all our basic human needs have been met, and we can eat and we can sleep and we can live in comfort, what is next? The urge to express yourself in hardcovers might not be top of everybody’s list, but I suspect it’s near the top of Charles Saatchi’s. During a career of extraordinary success and achievement, Saatchi has kept his counsel on most subjects. He never gives interviews, he doesn’t like parties much (he doesn’t even go to his own) and I have yet to see him popping up on TV shows offering opinions about anything at all. This may be about control. When you have been in charge of so much for so long, you really don’t want your thoughts and ideas twisted out of recognisable shape by snarky interviewers who might not have your best interests at heart. But you still want to express those thoughts and ideas, and because you’re Charles Saatchi, you find a way.

Babble, then, is a collection of short essays, although that may be too highfalutin a term: in tone and style, they feel more like newspaper columns. In each, Saatchi takes a subject — the theatre, say, or Franz Liszt, or your last meal on Death Row — and writes 1,500 or so pithy words about it. Sometimes he tells jokes, sometimes he rants, sometimes he muses. A few of his opinions drift into Grumpy Old Man territory: he hates wind farms, doesn’t believe that secondary smoking gives you cancer, prefers an enormous meal to any form of exercise. ‘Many people cycle or swim to keep trim. But if swimming is so good for the figure, how do you explain whales?’