Literature

Passionate pioneers

If Mary Wollstonecraft, as she once declared, ‘was not born to tred in the beaten track’, the same with even greater reason could be said of her daughter Mary Shelley. Not only was she the child of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was also the daughter of William Godwin, the radical political philosopher. Given this auspicious pedigree, it is perhaps not surprising that Shelley would lead a life every bit as daring as her mother, and in Frankenstein produce a masterpiece of equal fame. A joint biography of this most famous mother/daughter combination is, therefore, a good idea. Despite the fact that Wollstonecraft died

Both lyricist and agitator: the split personality of Vladimir Mayakovsky

Why increase the number of suicides? Better to increase the output of ink! wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response to the death of a fellow poet. Four years later, aged 36, he shot himself. What drove the successful author, popular with the public and recognised by officialdom, to suicide? Bengt Jangfeldt provides some clues to this question in his detailed, source-rich biography. Mayakovsky came to poetry as a Futurist, co-authoring the 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which granted poets the right ‘to feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time’. That the new era demanded a new language was a principle

The prophet Tolstoy and his dodgy vicar

One fine day in June 1896, a lone Russian nihilist visited Leo Tolstoy on his country estate. Come to hear the master, the stranger questioned Tolstoy about his latest beliefs. Satisfied, he left later that day. But then he returned with a written confession. He was an undercover policeman, sent to check on what Tolstoy was up to. Deeply ashamed of his deception, he begged for forgiveness. This vignette, recounted by Alexandra Popoff in her new book about Tolstoy’s later life, perfectly captures the author’s power. Whether through his fiction or radical Christianity, Tolstoy could fascinate and compel in equal measure. Though the government spy was dismissed for his bungling,

It’s about time a man won the Booker again

I bet fifty quid on Howard Jacobson winning the Man Booker. My original bet was actually on a ‘Yes’ vote below 40 per cent in the Scottish referendum and Bet365 then gave me £100 to bet on something else. I spent half of it on Jacobson and the other half on the Conservatives winning the last by-election. The less said on that the better. My reasoning for plumping for Jacobson made more sense. Anti-semitism is in fashion at the moment, so a novel about a mysterious holocaust seems timely; he’s a tried and tested literary heavyweight, so there’d be no accusations of dumbing down; and he’s a man – and after wins from Hilary Mantel and Eleanor

A brief history of biker gangs at war – Islamofascist Iraq edition

America and Britain are still fumbling for policies to deal with nationals joining the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In Holland, meanwhile, authorities faced a more cheering task: sorting out Dutch motorbikers who’ve joined the Kurdish Peshmerga against Isis. To accomodate freelance counter-jihadists, the ever-progressive Dutch have amended their rules against joining foreign armies, Agence France-Presse reports. The three Dutch Peshmerga we know of so far belong to a biker club called ‘No Surrender’,  whose chief concerns were heretofore limited to motorcycling and brawling with Hell’s Angels. Speaking of Hell’s Angels, Dutch hog-heads aren’t the first to take interest in a foreign freedom-fight. In his classic 1966 profile, Hunter S Thompson described the American bikers’ early tiffs with

Will Self is wrong (again): online reading isn’t negligent reading

Dim the lights, half-muffle the bells, replace your Hatchard’s bookmark with a strip of black crepe: the novel is dead. Again. Will Self broke the news in last Saturday’s Guardian, proclaiming in characteristically sepulchral tones that ‘our literary culture is sealed’. He has form in this regard: this latest article follows another Guardian piece in May this year whose headline assures us that ‘The novel is dead (this time it’s for real)’, and will presumably be followed by ‘The novel has ceased to be’, ‘Bereft of life, the novel rests in peace’, and ‘The novel has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined

The Mayor of London is a wally: official

Far from it being Mr Steerpike’s prerogative to call a former editor of the Spectator a wally, he was rather amused by Boris’s latest escapade. Now we can all relive those classic moments when the Mayor of London was hunting for a seat in Parliament, with ‘Where’s Boris?’ – a Wally-style search-and-find picture book, out next month from Orion. Another step toward immortality for BoJo. How many other wannabe PMs have made it into children’s book hero format?

This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece

Subscribers to this periodical, while Mark Amory has been literary editor, must often have felt they were enjoying an incomparable feast. Even The Spectator at its best, however, could not quite rival the periodical the Russian Herald (Russkii Vestnik) under the editorship of M.N. Katkov. This phenomenal editor, in the year 1866, secured serial publication of the two giants of Russian fiction. Tolstoy had been slow in giving Katkov enough material for continuous serial publication of War and Peace. To fill the gap, Katkov enlisted Dostoevsky. Readers could enjoy episodes from War and Peace in the spring numbers of the magazine. Then in May, they could start Crime and Punishment.

The great David Ekserdjian deserves a museum of his own

Ever since Mr Blair’s New Dawn of 1997, the dominant idea in public policy towards public collections has been ‘access’. The doctrine is more than half-right: art, antiquities etc paid for by the public are not doing their work unless we can see them. But it has promoted the heresy that the person chosen to run every museum must be a communicator rather than a scholar. Actually, both is best. True, some learned persons are interested only in objects and cannot communicate with the human race, but the best evangelisers for a museum or gallery are the people who really know its contents. The best-known current example is Neil Macgregor,

Doctor Zhivago’s long, dark shadow

For most Russians, Boris Pasternak is one of their four greatest poets of the last century. For most Anglophone readers, he is the man who won the Nobel Prize for Doctor Zhivago. The first four chapters of The Zhivago Affair give a full picture of Pasternak’s life and the Soviet literary world up until the early 1950s, when Zhivago was nearing completion. Pasternak was born in Moscow in 1890, into an assimilated and highly cultured Jewish family. His father was a painter, his mother a concert pianist; among the family’s friends were Leo Tolstoy, Sergey Rachmaninov and Rainer Maria Rilke. Pasternak wanted first to be a composer, then a philosopher

Michael Gove and the Ship of Fools

It lies rigged and fully masted in the harbour, the Ship of Fools, and soon it will be crewed by some of our favourite smarties. Is that Shami Chakrabarti charging down the gangway? It surely is. Those sharp elbows can be identified at a hundred paces. And is she being followed by Hanif Kureishi and Jeanette Winterson, eyes bulging like bulldog’s whatsits? Yes, they’re on parade too. Oh look, they’ve brought a chaplain, the Rev Giles Fraser. All shipshape and Bristol-fashion. Now they can cast off. If a person may be judged by the quality of his enemies then Michael Gove currently rests only slightly lower than the angels. As

Why do so many of our MPs feel the need to write books?

It sometimes feels like there is a never-ending flood of books written by politicians delivered to the Spectator offices. Almost every week a new one – or the invitation to a book launch of a new one – comes through the door. As I type, for example, I can see Fraser’s invitation to the launch of Tristram Hunt’s Ten Cities that Made an Empire (which Hunt was promoting on yesterday morning’s Start the Week), and a copy of Kwasi Kwarteng’s War and Gold on the bookshelf beside me. But what I want to know is, how do all these MPs have the time to write books, when they ought to be

The fairytale life of Hans Christian Andersen

It has long been my habit, when approaching a new biography, to read the account of the subject’s childhood first, then jump to the deathbed, before settling down to the main narrative between. It was rather disconcerting, therefore, to find that Paul Binding’s life of Hans Christian Andersen eschews the deathbed and ends with the author’s last, not very cheering, written words rather than his last breath: The brewer is dead, Auntie is dead, the student is dead, him whose sparks of ideas ended up in the rubbish bin. Everything ends up in the rubbish bin. It is only in the chronology that we learn that Andersen’s 70th birthday was

The great Shakespeare authorship question

Was William Shakespeare just a nom de plume? The question is usually dismissed as boring, only of interest to snobs and cranks. Clever people, like the Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, know better. But the old authorship debate has been given new life of late, thanks to the energetic writer Alexander Waugh, who is adamant that Shakespeare was not a poor boy from Stratford, but the aristocrat Edward De Vere. At a debate at Ye Olde Cock Tavern in London on Wednesday, Waugh and fellow author Ros Barber roundly thumped Professors Duncan Salkeld and Alan Nelson. The ‘anti-Stratfordians’, as Waugh’s side are known, are on a roll. On Sunday, it was

Churchill was as mad as a badger. We should all be thankful

Land sakes! Another book about Winston Churchill? Really? Give us a break, the average reader may think. Actually though, as title and subtitle suggest, this isn’t just another biographical study. It’s at once odder and more conventional than that. More conventional because, in some ways, it is just another biographical study. Odder because — instead of being a straightforward discussion of Churchill’s literary work — it sees literature as the key to his biography. More than that, its author seems to think he has hit on a ‘new methodology’ in which ‘we can write political history as literary history’. Well, perhaps. At one end of that notion is the banality

New literary award launches. But is the Folio Prize just a pretentious version of the Booker?

The British Library isn’t the first place I associate with contemporary fiction. For me, it’s about the Tudor manuscripts: the support and expertise of the manuscript room staff is second to none, and to the academic mind, few thrills compare to finding Elizabeth I’s distinctive handwriting on an unexpected document, or deciphering treacherous correspondence in a prayer book. But DBC Pierre it sure ain’t. Yet under the alert leadership of Roly Keating, the man who put BBC Four on the map, the British Library is now carefully fostering a commitment to living writers, not merely the dusty and dead. In a masterstroke of curation, when I leave the manuscript room,

Is any kind of sex still taboo in literature?

The first gay marriage will be conducted this Easter, and those who still object to the idea find themselves in a minority. The majority, according to polls, can’t see what all the fuss is about. How far we have travelled in a relatively short period of time. Until 1967, the punishment for homosexuality was a year in prison, or chemical castration, which was the option taken by Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park codebreaker. At least he has now been posthumously pardoned, so that’s OK. Extreme though attitudes to homosexuality have been in the past, I don’t think that, as a subject, it ever had the status of a taboo, not properly.

It’s time that Scotland’s timid posh folk spoke out

I took part in a documentary about Scottishness a few weeks ago, and it wasn’t bad at all. I mused, mainly, on my own border-hopping, fretful-about-independence Scottish-Britishness, and a decent number of people got in touch afterwards to say I’d been speaking for them, too. Others were more cross, but interestingly so. One thing about the whole experience bugs me, though. That was the way they had me sit in a swanky Scottish restaurant in Belgravia and made out like I belonged there. It’s not that you don’t get Scots in Belgravia. Most will probably own castles back in Scotland, too, though. When they move to Belgravia, they do so

Ian Buruma’s notebook: Teenagers discover Montaigne the blogger

Bard College in upstate New York, where I teach in the spring semester, is an interesting institution, once better known for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll than academic rigour. This has changed, thanks to Bard’s president, Leon Botstein, who conducts orchestras when he is not presiding. This semester, I am teaching a class in literary journalism. I asked my students to write a short essay about their favourite writer of non-fiction. This proved to be difficult for some, since they had no favourite writers of non-fiction; indeed they had never read any literary non-fiction at all for pleasure, certainly not at book length. But several did come up with

The inherent strength of religion cannot mask the fragility of Christian belief in Britain

Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary critic, has been something of a hero of mine since the publication of his Reason, Faith and Revolution, a thoroughgoing demolition of the Richard Dawkins critique of religion – on the sound basis that Prof Dawkins didn’t know what he was talking about – and his latest, Culture and the Death of God, promises to be pretty good too. listen to ‘Terry Eagleton on the Today programme’ on Audioboo