It was a glorious spring day, but Tim Weiner was thinking about the folly of men. “It’s a beautiful day outside. I go past a statue of [Field Marshal] Haig and I remembered all those poor bastards who died on beautiful spring days.” Weiner has made a career documenting folly — and deceit. He won
This is the year of literary anniversaries. Dickens, Durrell and Stoker are joined by Kerouac, who was born 90 years ago this week. In addition to the usual raft of special editions and gushing talks, Kerouac’s birthplace — Lowell, Massachusetts — will premier his only known play, Beat Generation, in October. The play was only
The latest edition of the White Review was launched at Foyles yesterday evening and long into the night. The magazine is a vehicle for new writers, supported by the work of and interviews with established authors and artists. This quarter’s edition features a short story by Deborah Levy, a discursive interview with Ahdaf Soueif and poems
The political battle over library closures has intensified. Earlier this morning, shadow culture secretary Dan Jarvis chastised libraries minister Ed Vaizey for being the ‘Dr Beeching of libraries’. Jarvis said that Vaizey should not be so ‘short-sighted’ as to permit 600 libraries to shut in England. He urged the government to intervene to save these ‘vital assets’,
It is literary festival season, and there seem to be more than ever. In the next three months, there will be gatherings at Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwick, Swindon, Oxford, Cambridge, Hay, Glasgow — I could go on and on and on. The second wave of festivals comes in the high summer, before the final and long hurrah in
Elliot Perlman’s The Street Sweeper is an extraordinary book. It is not perfect — it is repetitive, opinionated and long — but it is extraordinary nonetheless. Perlman unites the Holocaust and the civil rights movement as themes in a narrative that runs from rural Lithuania in the early ‘30s to modern day New York. Calls
Much ado this morning about Joanna Trollope, the chief judge at this year’s Orange Prize, who admitted that she was ‘influenced’ by a book’s cover. The Bookseller’s Philip Stone told the Times that ‘he was surprised that Joanna Trollope said that covers are significant. In a literary prize a book should be judged by the
Just his luck. Adrian Mole is 30 years old — or 43 and ¾s to be precise. The appreciation of Sue Townsend’s most famous creation has grown into uncritical hagiography. The Mole series is not effortlessly and consistently brilliant as the Blandings or Jeeves and Wooster novels, or Tom Sharpe’s Wilt farces. The later Mole
Who remembers Chips Channon? Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon was an American born Conservative MP, a Bright Young Thing, and a marvellously indiscreet diarist. Or so he is alleged to have been. His diaries have never been published in full, so scandalous was their content — particularly of his promiscuous liaisons with many of the great
It’s not a bad time to be a journalist, not wholly bad. Sure, the industry is in apparently irrevocable decline and it is being flagellated before Lord Justice Leveson. But, for the first time in years, there is a species more hated than the Hack. The vitriol against bankers is unrelenting — each week brings
The British Empire produced some great books. Both sides of the debate over the empire’s moral worth should be able to agree on that at least. Empire was a major subject the nineteenth century’s great essayists and historians. Macaulay’s History of England is underpinned by the assumption that the history of England was ‘emphatically the history
There is no stopping ‘the Inimitable’ in his bi-centenary year. The Duff Cooper Prize was awarded last night, and the winner was Becoming Dickens by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. The prize is awarded to the best work of history, biography or political science published in French or English in any given year; it is held at the French
This week marks Lawrence Durrell’s centenary. Durrell was once the great white hope of British fiction, but the cult has lapsed since his sixties heyday. Richard Davenport-Hines recently reappraised the The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell’s most famous work. He wrote, ‘It is hard now to recapture the impact half a century ago of these novels’ heat, luxuriance
A ‘gigantic confidence trick’ — that is how Jeremy Paxman describes the British Empire. The first episode of the TV series which accompanies his book, Empire: What ruling the World Did to the British, aired last night. Paxman’s thesis can be reduced into a string of his trademark soundbites. British imperialism was a ‘protection racket’,
John Steinbeck was born 110 years ago today. To mark the occasion, here, courtesy of the always intriguing Letters of Note, is a letter Steinbeck wrote to his son Thom, then a teenager. It speaks for itself. New York November 10, 1958 Dear Thom: We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from
Sometimes a usually toxic stereotype can play out harmlessly, charmingly even, before your eyes. It happened to me at Jewish Book Week (JBW) yesterday. I was in a queue at the bookshop, minding my own business as the couple ahead moved to the check-out. They were an odd pair at first glance. He was tall and dishevelled, his kippah
It is 30 years since the Falklands war, and a flush of anniversary memoirs is being published. The best of the bunch is Down South, by former navy man Chris Parry. We’ll have an interview with Parry later this week; but, in the meantime, here’s Max Hastings (£), who made his name reporting on the
Editorial conferences are fraught affairs. There is a rush of facts, opinions and suggestions. It’s a brave man who trusts his memory to retain all the information. ‘S’, a young Russian journalist who lived between the wars, was one such brave man. He could recall perfectly each name, number and hint that his editor had
This column is supposed to be about fiction, but it ought to be about good writing in general. Paul Lay, editor of History Today, has picked out his top five narrative histories, mixing ancient and modern classics. I can’t dissent from his judgment that Edward Gibbon is the master of the genre. Nor can I
Cult US site Flavorwire recently produced a photo-feature on 20 beautiful bookshops from around the world, and it has since compiled a list of 20 beautiful private libraries. The sense of barely contained disorder contrasts with rooms that seem to have been arranged for a lifestyle magazine, such as the design by Sally Sirkin Lewis above. It
