Proust

Monday

Julie Bindel

TV snobs hate the telly because it’s watched by those born on the wrong side of the tracks

Growing up in the 1970s I watched as much TV as humanly possible. When we had important visitors to the house my mum would merely turn down the volume, and by the time we went to bed you could have fried an egg on the screen. Now that I am a middle-aged, middle-class professional the only thing that has changed is I watch even more of it. I have a TV in my bedroom, in the kitchen, lounge, and access to it on my phone, iPad and laptop. But all my adult life, since I began mixing with educated, privileged people, I have been plagued by TV snobs. You know

Thursday

Peter Parker

Brains with green fingers

‘Life is bristling with thorns,’ Voltaire observed in 1769, ‘and I know no other remedy than to cultivate one’s garden.’ This is the remedy espoused by Candide at the end of Voltaire’s satirical novel, published ten years earlier, and the literal and metaphorical cultivating of gardens is the subject of Damon Young’s sprightly and stimulating little book. Young examines the relationship between gardening and philosophy in the life and work of 11 writers, from the 18th to the 20th century, topping and tailing these individual essays with a consideration of the Ancient Greeks. What he calls the ‘plein-air tradition of philosophy’ starts with Aristotle giving lectures in the Lyceum, a

Thursday

Christopher Howse

How much can you tell about E.E. Cummings from this photo?

Do you think you can tell things about writers from the way they look in a painting or photograph? A more demanding test: from their books can you predict how authors look? It sounds unlikely, yet, upon seeing a photograph of an author, we do find ourselves exclaiming: ‘That’s not how I thought he’d look!’ In Portrait of the Writer there are 250 photographs with a potted biography opposite each. ‘In the best instances,’ says Goffredo Fofi in the foreword, ‘we can see in the photograph that the writer (although not just the writer) has discovered something about himself or herself that he or she was unaware of or had