Mark Mason talks about trivia via books, articles, guided walks and the pub.
Britain is still an essentially Victorian country (see Daily Mail for details). So it’s no surprise that we keep returning to the period for inspiration. Victoriana: The Art of Revival at the Guildhall Art Gallery (until 8 December) is a collection of modern pieces channelling the age when corsets were tighter than George Osborne’s purse
I’ve been trying to think of something – anything – in recent years that has had a bigger effect on the working day of the average writer than Twitter. And I can’t. Writing, for just about everyone who does it professionally, is the act of minimising your number of excuses for not writing. Nigel Farndale’s
Such an ugly word, ‘binge’. Why can’t we talk about ‘spree drinking’ or ‘frolic drinking’ or ‘extravaganza drinking’? But no, it has to be ‘binge drinking’, a term loaded (pre-loaded?) with connotations. Well you can stick your connotations: it’s binge drinking for me every time. Or rather not every time. That’s the whole point: you
Normally you come to the Speccie Books blog, brainy bunch that you are, for high-minded literary comment. But this is August. Holiday month. A time when you simply can’t be fagged with the latest trends in Proustian scholarship. The only French words you want to hear at the moment are ‘Ambre Solaire’. What you really
‘Would you mind if I asked what your book is?’ She was in her late-thirties, with dark hair and a serious demeanour. Her reply to my question took a few seconds to appear, the short period in which a woman assesses whether the man sitting opposite her in a not-very-busy Tube carriage in the middle
This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about Rwandan cycling. Well, it is. Tim Lewis gives us the story of Adrien Niyonshuti’s attempts to qualify for the 2012 Olympics under the tutelage of American cycling legend Jock Boyer. Adrien and his teammates are
Senility is a cunning mistress. She’s always finding new ways to twist your melon, man. The latest trick she’s playing on me is Western House Syndrome. I should point out before we go any further that I’m not talking about real senility. Still only in my early forties, I have just as strong a grip
The coffee and walnut cake was excellent. As was the chocolate cake, and the tea and biscuits. The conversation was wonderful too. We talked about death. We were here, we dozen or so people in a meeting room in a small Suffolk market town on a sunny June evening, to do something British people never
We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors XI by The Authors Cricket Club, with a foreword by Sebastian Faulks (Bloomsbury, £16.99). Instead there’s ‘Passchendaeleian’ and ‘Ballardian’ (of pitches), ‘burst-sofa torsos’ (of themselves) and the observation that the French revolutionaries’ cry of ‘Aux
‘Words and cricket,’ wrote Beryl Bainbridge, ‘seem to go together.’ Why should this be? The Ashes series starting next week might not be the most eagerly anticipated of recent times, due mainly to the Aussies having developed a taste for self-destruction rivalling that of Frank Spencer. But still the words come. Broadsheets and blogs alike
There I was, slowly and not ungrumpily coming to terms with the fact that there weren’t going to be any more decent books about the Apollo missions. Only 12 men ever walked on the Moon, and the ones that were interested in writing autobiographies had already done so. There’d been the brilliant one-volume history of
As a teenager in the 1980s I liked Jimmy Connors. This meant parking my not inconsiderable jealousy that he’d once had Chris Evert as his girlfriend. Magnanimously, I agreed to do so. Not only did the star respond to a shout of ‘come on Connors’ with ‘I’m trying for Chrissakes!’, he was also, you sensed,
It only took me twelve years as a published writer to get round to seeing one of my own books being printed. But when it came the experience set off all sorts of thoughts about books, how we see them and what their future might be. From the outside, the CPI Mackays factory on a
Never mind all this gay stuff — when is parliament going to get on with the marriage legislation we really need? I’m talking about the law banning men from proposing to their girlfriends in public. It’s been happening for years. Local radio was always the worst offender. ‘Gareth, I think you’ve got something you want
I’m writing this by the pool in Greece. It’s not a pool I own, you understand (though give it a couple of years and we might all be able to afford one). No, it’s the pool in the resort to which my partner and I have repaired for a week, safe in the knowledge that
We need more conservationists like Dave Goulson. Cack-handed animal killers, that is. As a child in the 1970s Goulson tried to dry out some ‘bedraggled’ bumblebees which had got caught in a thunderstorm. He put them on the hotplate of the electric cooker and set it to low. Then he went off to feed his
I was hoping this was going to be a post featuring an interview with a writer. After reading a proof copy of George Lowe’s Letters from Everest, I had the idea of talking to him about the book. How could it not be fascinating, went the thinking, to meet the 89 year-old sole survivor of
She divided us in life, she’s dividing us in death. Baroness Thatcher was so controversial that a single letter in a single word in the subtitle of a book that someone else has written about her and is being published after her funeral can get people’s backs up. Charles Moore’s biography is, according to its
The greatest event in the sporting calendar is on us once more: the World Professional Snooker Championship. With an opening sentence like that you’re probably expecting one of those ironically post-modern ‘let’s go slumming with the plebs’ pieces. Well don’t. I’m serious. Snooker is criminally undervalued. The next two weeks in Sheffield offer the finest
If you go down to the British Library today, you’re sure of a big surprise. Because as of last weekend, it’s archiving not just every book published in the UK (its traditional role), not just every e-book published in the UK – it’s archiving every website based in the UK. In terms of what we’ve
