Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Peachy Barack

Whether the 'Barack' in Barack Obama stands for peach or apricot or Persian or all three (see comments on last post), this is the number of democrat candidates that we look like seeing after the Texas and Ohio primaries next Tuesday.

Or will we?

What sort of shake will be needed to make Hillary fall finally from the 'autumn apricot' tree?

Obama's Big Read

Perhaps I haven't been noticing before. But I've just seen my first book in a catalogue to come with an endorsement from Barack Obama.

University of Chicago Press is offering a reissue of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Irony of American History with a quote from the Democrat frontrunner about "one of my favourite philosophers".

It turns out that Senators Obama's admiration for being 'humble and modest' in our belief that we can eliminate the hardship, pain and  'serious evil in the world'  was not expressed exclusively for his home state's most distinguished publishing company.

It came from an interview reference to Niebuhr which has attracted considerable interest in the US though not yet much in the UK.

A little upscale intellectual reading matter is always attractive in a candidate. I remember Bill Clinton making jolly claims once for his intimacy with Marcus Aurelius.

Most voters won't know what Obama is talking about.

Those who have heard of Niebuhr will be impressed.

Those who have read and understood him will be too few to matter.

The only slight worry for those who fear Obama as the next Jimmy Carter is that Niehbuhr was claimed as a big deal in the Georgia peanut farm libraries too.

Remembering Jack Lyons

The 'valley of the shadow of death' is ' an ancient but probably fanciful' rendering from the fourth line of the 23rd Psalm.

The 'darkest valley' is the phrase justified and preferred in modern versions.

In Leonard Bernstein's notoriously challenging Chichester Psalms, commissioned in 1965 and using early themes from West Side Story, all the words are sung in Hebrew.

So those in York Minster in June 2006, who were concentrating hard at the 90th birthday concert for my friend, Jack Lyons,  did not need to concern themselves for death, shadow or darkness.

Today Jack is dead - and the newspapers this morning tell the stories of his business skill, his personal charm, his generosity to musicians all over the world and to the court cases which overhung his later years.

Jack was a great philanthropist for the arts, a rare man of a rare kind, never more needed than today.

The Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall at York will be one of many enduring legacies.

His personal qualities were etched out, enhanced for all his friends to see, by the difficulties of his last years.

And eventually, though the fight was long, the unfairnesses of the Guinness case became understood by more than just his friends.

To listen to music with Jack was always to see it on his face, the Chichester Psalms in his beloved York most clearly so.

To listen to music with Jack was always to listen to music with his beloved Roslyn too, the singer who had long brought so much music and more into their shared lives

Bernstein never wrote a happier sacred song - and Jack's face was full of happiness that 90th birthday night in the Minster, surrounded by music students, listening to music students whose work, especially this most difficult work, he had helped to come alive.

That is how I remember him now.

Elephants on Valentine's Day

I have a wonderful friend, Debbie, in Hartford Connecticut, whose web-settings, I discover, bring her everything about elephants, creatures to whom she is much dedicated, especially in respect of stopping their cruel treatment in captivity.

So, when I write about the possible origins of the phrase 'Elephant in the Room', she gets the post - even though elephants in real rather than metaphorical rooms are the ones most on her mind.

Debbie is also a solid Democrat.

Republicans are the only elephants she doesn't like.

So. I'm sure she would appreciate - probably already does appreciate - the latest wave of Democrat fire at the Republican frontrunner to arrive in my inbox.

Every day there arrives here elephant-shot from each side but this one, I thought, had some raw class.

Since I have mentioned elephants five times in this post, she - and others with pachyderms on their minds - will probably be able to say whether they agree.

Elephant in the bedroom

One of my missions in life, as readers know, is to bring ever more subscribers around the world to see the magnificence of the TLS.

If anyone in our magnificent marketing departments decides to read this post (let them never fear!) it is my main mission, surpassing all others.

Which is why I was on my way to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation at 8.30 am today, dodging frost, fog and Falun Gong protesters in the London streets, to contribute to its excellent Book Show.

Being unable to tune in to ABC from my car (insufficiently digitalised, I guess), I was reliant on BBC Radio Four alone as I tried to park.

The subject on its Today programme was, however, a particularly suitably TLS one.

Literary pachyderms.

Duncan Fallowell requests

Duncan Fallowell was the first person to send me a party invitation on black card. This seemed very glamorous at the time.

Oxford,1972 or nearby. The co-host was my friend, James Ruscoe, an exceptionally wise and clever man whom I've met a few times since then in Rome.

Duncan? I'm not sure I've ever met him since the black-card night - and I don't recall even that night in any way. I may not have gone to the party at all. It was the card itself with its gold lettering (I think, gold) which stuck in the mind, the blackness certainly.

I knew before I saw his new book this week that since the 1970s Duncan Fallowell had written a biography of the pioneer transvestite, April Ashley (recently plagiarised), a travel book about St Petersburg, a novel called 'A history of facelifting' and assorted book reviews for The Daily Telegraph.

I hadn't read any of them. Not sure why. No reason bar other things to read. When the latest book arrived, 'Going as far as I can: the ultimate travel book', I looked and thought that I wouldn't read that one either. What would be the point? I'd lost touch - and what other reason was there?

I began it in the back of a taxi. The book itself begins in transit too, with the story of a flight to Auckland. Many writers have thought that the time and agony of a plane-journey to the other side of the world must make compensating copy. No one else, in my experience, has ever done so as surreally and successfully as Duncan has here.

The premise of the book is that he has inherited a small legacy from a friend and will use it to get away from London as far as he can. His quest (every travel book needs a quest) is to follow the theatrical journey through New Zealand made by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1946, the year of the author's birth.

This seems no more promising than the flight until I'm deep in the search for the St James Theatre, a gilded palace without seats and with a reputation for raves, once owned by a brewer who had succesfully wooed Ms Leigh on a subsequent Olivier-free trip. She left a substantial pile of his shares in her will.

So far I'm only a third of the way through the book, laughing, nodding agreement at the choleric ideas, gasping at the prose, noticing that New Zealanders don't seem quite so keen. I haven't reached the promised parts about Karl Popper or pink wine or the monster with a third eye.

My copy has been borrowed - always a good sign.

Duncan has apparently spent much of the time since we last met as a writer with a German band called Can.

A taxi-ride to the the songs of Can on the i-pod cannot be delayed.

A 'yes' to the black invitation is probably a bit late.