Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Nobel nights

These have been unusually good nights in London to hear great actors in the service of Nobel Literature Prize winners.

Tuesday: The Lover and The Collection, two plays at the Comedy Theatre by Harold Pinter from the 1960s, with Gina McKee and Charlie Cox shining in a stellar cast, and Pinter (Nobel 2005) reminding us of his youthful Rattigan-mode, when drawing-room wit set the foundations for every dark-room pause.

Wednesday: The Golden Notebook and The Grass is Singing, two books by Doris Lessing elegantly read in extract by Juliet Stevenson and Alan Rickman, the entertainment to mark the awarding of the Swedish Academy insignia itself, reminding the crowd at the Wallace Collection that Lessing too (Nobel 2007), is less severe than she sometimes seems to be.

As well as affectionate praise for two prized legends of our time, both now physically frailer than we or they would like, sexual incomprehension was a common theme.

Tuesday: the leather-dressed Ms McKee playing fantasy adultress under her suburban tea-table.

Wednesday: Ms Stevenson on the matter of penis sizes, as men and women differentially see them.

For readers of this who want their own Nobel thrill, the revelatory Pinter night, presented by Howard Panter for the Ambassador Theatre Group, will run and run - or at least for a limited run, as they say in the trade.

Sadly, the Lessing show, courtesy yesterday of HarperCollins and English Pen, was a one-night stand.

Sex lives before the Saturday feature

Which of the 20th century's great children's authors was also one of its best-selling child pornographers?

We won't start a speculative list here, however fashionable the 'weblist' concept may be these days.

One never knows which author might still be alive.

He or she might be a hundred years old. But they can still sue.

Selling stories of sex with children may have been just about OK in old Vienna.

It is now the ultimate evil-of-evils. We can't be too careful.

Why am I asking this question anyway?

Well, there were three small deer on the lawn early yesterday, taking advantage of the vanished flood water to snaffle some rose leaves.

Cute little Bambis! Bloody little Bambis!

I'm a child of the cartoon-comic Fifties, when no one could see or even think about a cute little fawn without uttering - or at least thinking - the word 'Bambi'.

And so it was yesterday. I chased the little beasts away with Disneyesque abuse.

Islam's missing scientists

One of the many joys of editing newspapers is getting private answers to public questions.

Will the minister resign by lunchtime? Who is the 'royal' accused of deviancy with his pet dog? Which Hollywood star is the one mentioned in the gossip columns for misbehaviour with his motor mechanic? Whom do the police really think is guilty of the Peckham-Gulch paedophile murder?

It's addictive. Editors want to know the answers - and can insist on knowing.

In years gone by, when newspapers were small and staffs were large, an editor would always know more than anyone else did - and far more than he (more or less always a he) had space to publish, even had he wanted to.

Now, thanks to the internet, to blogging and to 24-7 news reporting, that is much less true.

I gave a lecture about this phenomenon once. If you want to find it (and are prepared to disentangle its main point from an excess of stuff about Graham Greene) then thanks to this very  medium which turned that former advantage into history, you can still read what I said.

Most newpaper editors will  always wants their answers quickly. There's only a point in knowing the name of the deviant royal is your lunchtime friends don't yet know.

The editor of the TLS can be more patient.

Last year I asked our distinguished Middle East editor, Robert Irwin, where lay the truth in the argument - then vigorously running at Nobel-Prize-winning level in our letters pages - about Islam's failure to produce serious scientists, allegedly no one since the 12th century.

He didn't produce an answer by lunchtime.

He did produce one last week.

Five links in a blog chain

Numerous calls and emails have accused me of being old-fashioned in resisting the fashion for 'best this and best that' lists in newspapers and websites.

So, just to show how courant I really am.

One. The Sunday Times this morning highlights my favourite blog - Books, Inq - as Number Three in its list of 'websites that will feed your mind rather than your credit-card bill'.

Two. Frank Wilson, main author of Books, Inq at the Philadelphia Inquirer, draws attention to a rather different list - Top Ten Drunk American Writers - on the website 'Alternative Reel - Quietly Redefining the Internet'.

Three. Edgar Allen Poe comes in at Number Four on that list - between Faulkner and Fitzgerald.

Poe's winning quote for his citation.
"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."

Four. Number One on my own weekend reading list is Poe,  A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd, the brilliant British critic, biographer and novelist who has from time to time worried his own friends with his association of alcohol and art - as well as astounding us with his passion and awesome productivity.

The Thames floods in Britain make any sort of reading a rather indulgent pastime. I've reached only page 45 in Peter's characteristically sharp portrait - where Poe is offering his literary wares to Manhattan - when the book has to be put aside.

Five. Top of my own email list at the end of this weekend is a report from New York of the  TLS's offering of literary wares to the same good people of Manhattan.

We're back with our TLS ad in Time Square - in the brightest bright lights, at 6 minutes, 20 minutes, 36 minutes and 52 minutes after each hour.

Catch us if you can - as writers, literary salesmen and list-makers of every age, drunk or sober or somewhere in between, would surely agree.

Lily in a loin cloth!

Was that Lily Cole outside our Stone Age cave or was it Twiggy?

We knew the Marks and Spencer supermodels must be somewhere out there on the Cape Peninsula beach.

The lodges of the nature reserve were full of rumours. Our excellent Grootbos guide (see previous post) had helpfully pointed out the top-of-the-range portaloos and caravans.

But which models? That was the question.

We were supposed to be out studying the South African wild places where homo sapiens began his life on earth, a few sites of 2000 year-old-pottery finds, a rocky haven for fish-spearing subjects of Queen Victoria (the Stone Age was a long time departing in this part of the world), the most recent archaeological excavations of it all.

But, with unmistakable signs of digital-age film-crew activity, the more exciting prospect was of spying red-headed Lily (exquisitely primitive, don't you think?) or Laura Bailey (looks just like a hunted deer, they say) or even Twiggy herself (more mother-of-the-tribe now  than we middle-aged men remember?).

So we waited - learning slightly more than even I wanted to know about the Klipgat Cave, how between 60 000 and 50 000 years ago, when the sea level was lower than it is today, Middle Stone Age people hunted eland, steenbok, black wildebeest, hares and molerats, collecting plants, tortoises, shellfish, seals and bird carcasses for our intellectual delectation.

Did they rear sheep or not? How many pastoralists had dogs?

Where was Elizabeth Jagger? When would we get our exclusive preview of the prize-winning ad campaign credited with saving one of Britain's best known companies?

Was there to be loin-cloth theme in next summer's swim-wear collection?

Sadly, I can't give an answer. The caravan doors stayed closed. So did the portaloos.

Even after an hour of Stone Age study the beach was home to nothing more exotic than a flock of lighting-camera-men.

Maybe we misunderstood the whole thing.

Archaeology has always need more patience than a blogger on holiday can readily command.

Under the White Milkwood

"When the fire burns out the hills are scorched black to the edge of the night', wrote the poet, Breyten Breytenbach, after his campaigning journey through South Africa in 1973.

The man who wrote The True Confessions of and Albino Terrorist meant the flames of protest against the apartheid regime - and the imprisonment, solitary confinement and torture which came to the protesters, not least those white protesters like himelf.

But he also conjured up the flames on which the landscape of the Cape peninsula depended - and still depends - for its survival by continual rebirth.

J K Who?

The current enthusiam for newspaper 'best lists' came a little late for me.

But I was still pleased to see Philip Larkin at the top of  Erica Wagner's 'Best British Writers Since 1945' list which begins the books section of Times Online for the New Year.

Rather than see the fifty as a league table, I prefer it as a dinner party - each writer placed in order around a circular table with Number One next to Number Fifty, thus Larkin (represented here in one of his schoolboy swatter's versions) next to the science fiction writer, Michael Moorcock.

I'm sure those two would get on fine.

So would Martin Amis (19) and Anthony Powell (20). That would be one of the best places for the literary waiter to stand and overhear.

Some of the others might be stormier.

V. S. Naipaul and J.R.R. Tolkien might be satisfied with scowling silently at one another.

Ian McEwan (35) and Geoffrey Hill (36) might at least agree that both of them should be higher up. And so they should.

When A.J.P Taylor (40) received his second festchrift of articles in his honour by distinguished colleagues, Isaiah Berlin (41) commented that "one festschrift should be enough for any mortal".

To be ranked far below Ian Fleming (14) and Muriel Spark, the highest woman at Number Eight, would not have pained Berlin too badly.

But to be just one below Taylor (who went on, in fact, to receive a third festschrift) might have been too much to bear once the port was passing for the second or third time.

At least they are both above their other dinner neighbour, J.K. Rowling (42).

Blissfully, neither of them would have known who she was.   

Renaissance knight - at last

I may have mentioned before that when I began this blog more than two years ago the webmeisters did not want to call it by my name.

'Boring', they said.

'You're a knight?'. True.

'You write about the Renaissance?' Rarely true.

'The Renaissance was full of knights?' Not particularly true.

'So your web-name's obvious.' Not.

I remember this again this New Year's day because, thanks to the Prime Minister and whoever else influences the Honours List we have Sir Brian Vickers, one of the greatest Renaissance scholars of our time, a much valued contributor to the TLS and now a real and well deserved Renaissance Knight.

His citation 'for services to literary scholarship' is a remarkable thing in itself.

The leaders in many areas of life feel that the honours system treats them unfairly. Too many actors. Not enough dentists. And so on.

But 'literary scholarship' has certainly not been especially favoured. I am trying to remember the last one. Perhaps it's just that 'new year's day feeling' but I can't quite place the name.