Diary – 1 September 2007

My holiday reading list this year was both accidental and catholic. Usually I plan some months in advance, but this year I managed to wolf down my summer reading list before stepping on a plane. Consequently I went to bed with Joanna Trollope, woke up with Philip Roth, had an affair with Tom Bower’s Conrad Black biography (principally because I felt I had to) and spent several days by the pool in Banyuls as the cicadas blithely scratched away in the olive trees with Rupert Everett. I even spent an afternoon with James Patterson just to see what all the fuss is about. But what mostly captured my attention was castration. Ever since Antony Beevor and Simon Sebag Montefiore began having genuine hits with the likes of Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 and Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, the manicured beaches and the teak and stainless steel terraces of southern Europe during the summer months have been littered with what the literary fraternity still refuses to admit it calls war porn.