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 Seven years before Waugh published Scoop, A. A. Milne wrote his own novel of a country writer caught up in city ways - complete with a proto-Lord Copper, a spiv reviewer, a thieving agent and an assortment of other delightful literary types.
Two People is the story of a marriage between a beautiful woman who loves the high life and an unexpectedly successful writer who loves bee-keeping. It is not often read - though compared with Milne's stories of Pooh Bear almost nothing is 'often read' - and, when referred to at all, it is in relation to Milne's own marriage and the difficult family life of the genius who gave Christopher Robin his Tigger and Eeyore.
Capuchin Classics has just reissued this cautionary tale for writers and their relatives, Milne's first attempt at an adult novel, written when the pleasure of Pooh-celebrity was beginning to pall. It is charming always and chilling sometimes too.
There is also a reference I'd never seen before to the thrill of awaking to receive the first six copies of one's novel and one's first review in the TLS, drawing "attention in a kindly way to the superficial area of the book, seven and a half by five and a half".
"This was news to Reginald who had never measured it. He measured it now and found that The Times, as usual, was right. He wondered idly if there was a man in the office who did this, and nothing but this. An interesting job which brought one into contact with good literature, yet made no unfair demand on the intellect . Vaguely he sketched out in his mind an application for the post".
Such a fine satirist, that A.A.Milne.
TLS readers are beginning to respond to my short piece at the front of the paper this week noting that Shakespeare in Arabic is available in the Guantanamo prison library (see official picture above) and wondering which plays would be most popular there.
My first thought was Measure for Measure, which begins with what might be an encouraging scene, a hero locked up for something that he did not know was illegal.
The Tempest provides escapist fantasies for reluctant island dwellers: though any inmate expecting repentance from the bad duke who imprisoned Prospero in the first place will be disappointed.
Students of Taming of the Shrew may see some unexpected sources for the use of surveillance, hunger and sleep deprivation: "She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat; / Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not . . . / And if she chance to nod I’ll rail and brawl, / And with the clamour keep her still awake". An attentive guard may, however, have censored Petruchio’s plans for his wife.
But much the favourite among the new suggestions is the prison scene in Twelfth Night and Feste's inventive means of persuading Malvolio that he is mad.
Note: others of our topical Page Three images are from today available as a slideshow on our website.
Thanks to the comments of Alex Drace-Francis I am warming to the seminar-room -politics of Africa - the chance to get away from the TLS shelves from time to time, away even from the excitement of Westminster expenses and to discuss the end of civil wars, the problem of putting armies back to peaceful purpose, to meet men whose private planes attract bombs and bullets not media outrage. For an editor steeped in Roman history and just a bit bored now by the British politics of tax-payer funded duck-islands, could anything be better than a quick session on the Cote d'Ivoire?
 Last week it was a seminar on Sudan that encouraged the comment here that I should get out from behind the bookshelves a bit more. So, yesterday there was the chance to see a little known Prime Minister selling his wares - ostensibly cocoa but probably more than that - who has just led an army into an interim government, who is not himself a candidate in the Cote d'Ivoire presidential election, but who promised his London audience that everything, while he kept his severe eye on the vote, would be just fine.
I haven't seen any media coverage of Guillaume Soro's trip to London. The seminar was on Chatham House rules which prevent direct quotation - but probably allow the reflection that the blue baize table, and matching uniform for a single, tea-pouring aide-de-camp seemed to suit the wary warrior. If you have fought your way to power - and for various reasons - are not putting yourself before voters this next time, St James's Square is the place you need to be. You can meet the influential seminarians who may support you on another occasion - or even your cocoa-selling campaign.
Some of the electoral difficulties are similar to the Sudan's - the registration of voters (the country appears to allow a very restricted franchise, less than half the population, but the casual seminar attender should be careful of too much detail), the discouragement of armed men manipulating the vote (Mr Soro spoke confidently of how he could do that), the fundamental problem of replacing war with peace quickly and by somewhat unaccustomed democratic means.
A student seminar attender would at this point have to reprise the recent history of Cote d'Ivoire (as it likes to be called) or Ivory Coast (as it's more often called). Personally, I haven't called it anything for years. But I will point the reader to Wikipedia with the confidence that its assessment, on this bit of West Africa, will be better than anything I can do.
It is a fascinating and complex story. I'd certainly take away a reading list.
Perhaps the TLS will receive some future hard-back account of this man who, in a mildly Caesarian way, seems to control elections he can't stand in, whose soldiers are almost out of politics but, in an equally Roman way, not quite. Prime Minister Soro has survived one Ides of March already.
He commanded the close attention of his hearers on the blue-leather, baize-and-uniform-matching chairs, including this one. In the best seminar spirit, I ended up wishing him well - before slipping next door into the London Library for the latest news from the more elderly years of a democratic process, those outrageous claims for wisteria-cutting, TV-viewing and a decent home for ducks to sleep safe from foxes.
Alex Drace-Francis is a historian of Romania whose views have to be considered with respect and care. He judges it 'Amazing!' that I 'finally went to a university seminar and learnt something'. I reported 'well', he says, on an evening last week at SOAS when distinguished observers of the electoral processes of Sudan told Londoners what was going on in that very strange country. He wants 'more, please'.
Bloggers need to be ever conscious of those who post them comments. So I am wondering which university seminar I might report on next. All suggestions welcome.
Traditionally, a TLS editor reads and writes about books, most recently, in my case, an unusual trilogy of Greek tragedies published by the Canadian poet, Anne Carson. Perhaps this bias has to change. So, in the meantime:
Imagine an Old Testament movie epic in which only the Genesis part is filmed by Cecil B. DeMille, Exodus goes to Alfred Hitchcock and Deuteronomy to Quentin Tarantino. The laws of Israel would still arise from the birth of the world and the lives of Abraham and Moses. But the differences in the storytelling would be stark, striking, revelatory maybe, but with the ever-present peril of lapse into an extended overstatement, an educational aid, a film-school history project.
An Oresteia is Anne Carson's application of this technique to the bible of the Ancient Greeks, the central tragic story of King Agamemnon's victorious return from the Trojan War, how his wife murdered him in his bath and how his children, Orestes and Electra, avenged that murder.
Aeschylus, the grand originator of Greek tragedy, told the whole story in his own Oresteia trilogy. But Carson translates only Act One from him; Acts Two and Three come from her previously composed versions of later plays by Sophocles and Euripides, allowing the Canadian modern poet and University of Michigan classics professor to display the history of early theatre in a single theatrical event.
The art of Greek tragedy, like that of 20th-century cinema, grew fast when it was young. Aeschylus, writing in the middle of the fifth century BC, after Athens had first established its strength in the Persian Wars, set out a confident saga of man resolving problems of divine law. Should children avenge a father's murder, or was the act of killing a mother a crime far worse?
Aeschylus's answer, reached after hours of grand high drama, was to hand the decision to a popular court, helped by a suitably progressive representative from Mount Olympus. The cycle of violence is ended by the judicious application of democracy.
Carson's selection from Aeschylus, which covers Agamemnon's homecoming and murder, not their consequences, conveys powerfully the playwright's struggle to bend a language to the new demands of a young art, his compounding of words into a "griefremembering pain" and "purplepaved, redsaturated path."
Sophocles saw both what Aeschylus had achieved — and not achieved. As a politician and general, he was as committed as Aeschylus to the advance of the Athenian empire; he himself fought in its battles. As a theatre writer, he cared more about the possibilities of individual character that accompanied power. His tragedy, Electra, the second in Carson's An Oresteia (and which she renders as Elektra), is for most of its length an obsessive expression of personal grief from a daughter about her father's murder, Western literature's first great delineation of one woman's mind.
Carson's own poetic range, proved over the years by novel renderings of Simonides and Sappho, allows her to vary and invigorate the rolling metaphors of Electra's assault on Clytemnestra and her lover: "You are some sort of punishment cage/ locked around my life./ Evils from you, evils from him/ are the air I breathe."
Euripides, the third of the men who defined Greek tragedy, is represented in this modern trilogy by his Orestes, a subversive farce that stands far from the courtroom finale to the story that Aeschylus had offered 50 years before. Euripides was a contemporary of Sophocles but not a politician himself; he was an occasional diplomat and elegist of the glorious dead, but his dyspeptic feelings about the world — during a war against Sparta that Athens was beginning to lose — are clear from all his plays, not least this last of Carson's trilogy. This is the story of how Orestes and Electra, brother and sister in the crime of mother-killing, are on the run in central Greece, contemplating kidnap, further murder and blackmail. Orestes is the only one of these plays where Tarantino would feel at home.
The god Apollo brings Euripides's play — and this whole modern show — to an end, just as he did for Aeschylus, this time not by a cliff-hanger casting vote in a courtroom but by forcing Orestes to marry his kidnapped cousin. The trial verdict is already fixed, nothing to worry about, with just a few small details to be tied up, as Carson has it: "Then go to Athens and stand trial for matricide./ Trust me. You'll win. And this girl whose throat is being grazed/ by your sword,/ Hermione, you'll marry./ I know she's supposed to marry somebody/ else (Neoptolemos, I think)/ but I'll see to it he dies."
This is a level of bathos — after what would probably be some five hours in the theatre — that a modern director determined on the decline of imperialist adventurism, in Athens and everywhere else, could deploy to full effect. Carson credits the commissioning of An Oresteia to the director of New York's Classic Stage Company, Brian Kulick. Reports of its opening last month, which I did not see, were mixed — with some disquiet expressed over an excess of political direction and a lack of unity in the tragic whole. It is not hard to see that happening.
For all the three tragedians' differences — and for all the artistic developments in their approach that have been analyzed by critics for 2,400 years — there was a sure and common expression of awe in Greek theatre, a sense that man and god, however their dealings might be revered, sidelined or mocked, were part of a true mystery, presented by rituals which, whoever was writing the script, remained largely unchanged. Carson understands and communicates that truth to her readers. It would not be surprising if directors found that task much more difficult — even with the elegant tools that this fine modern translator has given them.
Until 7.30 last night the sum of my knowledge of the politics of Sudan could have been written on a Khartoum postage stamp or the place on a pocket atlas that might or might not be Chad.
Thanks to an excellent discussion at SOAS, just around the corner from the TLS office, I now have a clear view of the upcoming Sudanese elections next year and the referendum on the future of the place (one country or two?) which is planned for 2011.
Anyone who wants to get up to speed with me can check out the Rift Valley Institute website and read Professor Woodward's, Atta al-Battahani's and Justin Willis's report. The general prognosis seemed, however, so gloomy (a voting sytem that even political scientists find taxing, vastly illiterate voters, utterly uneven access to campaign finance, one civil war that at least for a while has ended, another that has added Darfur to the international lexicon of horror) that the enthusiasm of the participants seemed almost a miracle.
Attempting to increase my knowledge to enough for a postcard not just its stamp, or for the huge area of an African atlas covered by Sudan itself, I tried to find out over a glass of SOAS white wine what the election was going to be about, who were the big figures, what were the decisive national issues.
Even to ask those questions, it transpires, reveals one's Chad-sized, second-class-postage understanding of Sudan. The place does not, apparently, have national politicians or national debates or leaders who want to argue for votes. If I didn't know that, I didn't know anything.
Quite.
I was still left wondering quite where my friends' careful analysis could now go. What sort of democracy are you going to get when all the normal journalistic questions are met with a 'not really a Sudanese thing'.
What's going to happen there?
Search me. Search the SOAS folk too.
By the second glass of wine, I'd worked out that a 'one-country-two-cultures' solution would be good - a kind of massive Belgium with sand.
A 'two-countries-one-peace-accord' would be OK too. A sort of EU after a few centuries of false starts.
A 'one-country-military-repression' was now very hard to see: that sounded promising.
A 'two-countries-sporadic-warfare' solution seemed more likely. Think Ethiopia and Eritrea, said my fellow wine-sipper. And I did, trying to remember just how bad that had been.
Everyone agreed that the coming elections were of real importance, deserving of much more international oversight and support,
But, however it works out, we can be confident that our best democratic processes, first-past-the-posts, party-lists, all-women-lists, proportional representation, all applied at once without political leaders to make life complicated, will have played their full and proper part.
A Meg Ryan chess set and an Academy Award stuffed inside a turkey: these are two of the star turns in Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturne, a Hollywood short story from the novelist best known for an English butler's memories in The Remains of the Day.
The story's human stars are an an actress abandoned by her singer husband and a saxophonist abandoned by his wife - both hoping, in different ways, that expensive plastic surgery will relaunch their careers. The saxophonist wants to get back to his instrument as soon as he can. The actress warns him: 'You blow on that horn a day before you're ready, bits of your face will fly out all over the room'.
And the story goes on from there.
It's an excellent piece of work but it is not easy to concentrate on it today, not on even this shortest of tales (never mind this week's megabooks reviewed in the current edition of the TLS).
Political Britain - that peculiar country where where in distant days I spent so much time - has become an inescapable place of noise.
There is a 24-hour scandal of expenses fiddling by Members of Parliament which rages like thunderous Musak in a lift, or a thousand ringtones in a train carriage.
Turn on the radio, open a newspaper, talk to any politician in town, and you hear the sound of MPs excusing misbehaviour, outraged at their own actions, not just the occasional sound but a gushing roar of 'o gosh, how could all this stuff have ever happened', hour after hour after hour.
So much so that I can't even read an Ishiguro story about a man blowing his face up, without imagining the hero as an MP explaining why the moat around his castle must be maintained at public expense.
To anyone reading in America, I kid you not. That is exactly what our MPs are huffing and puffing about - as well as claiming for Hollywood levels of food and amusement. A Meg Ryan chess set? That would be perfect beside our tax-payer funded swimming pool.
We seem to be ruled by a whole brass band of puffy-cheeked self-justifiers and self-liquidators. Do they blow to know, as the jazzmen used to say? I don't think so.
There are Old Labour hardmen on horn and tuba. There are New Labour gentlewomen on piccolo and flute. There are trumpet-playing Tories (blowing one's brain out has always been a tradition at the higher ends of the brass scale) and Liberals on the clarinet, bobbing and weaving in time to everyone else's music.
In Ishiguro's Nocturne the saxophonist faces only the 'exquisite embarassment' of waiting for the Los Angeles bandages to come off.
In this horribly unavoidable non-fictional world, that would be a blessed relief.
You can go years without an imagined sexual encounter with Anne Boleyn. And then two turn up at once.
In Hilary Mantel's new novel, Wolf Hall (to be reviewed in the TLS by Michael Caines next week), Thomas Cromwell, silky facilitator of King Henry's marriage to his second wife, has his own quiet reveries of resting his hand upon Anne's shoulder, 'following with his thumb the scooped hollow between her collarbone and her throat. .his forefinger tracking the line of her breast'.
Mantel paints a very modern portrait of Cromwell, an enlightened sceptic of a bloody age, but not as modern a piece of sexual fantasy as that in Niven Govinden's short story, Tudor Girls, in the latest issue of the often surprising Pen Pusher Magazine.
Govinden's hero is a punter in Romsey who chooses a lap-dancer dressed as the Tudor queen on his first visit to a Gentleman's Club.
He could have had a cheer-leader quicker but he was happy to wait (and pay four times the price) for a woman in full length emerald brocade 'with a pleasingly authentic anount of open chest'.
How would Henry VIII have handled a lap-dance? How much vaseline did this Tudor girl need to stop the chafing in her corset?. He decides that, on balance, he would rather fast-forward just a little in time and have the sickly fearful Anne awaiting execution in her Tower of London cell, an encounter that would be 'drab, mechanical, humiliating, more pleasurable'.
That not being available (except in the picture above), he chooses a Lulu and a Dusty Springfield while a suitable Eastern European is made up with pock-marks as Anne of Cleves.
In the end, he regrets his choice of period altogether: 'There was no recklessness to be had with the late Tudors not unless he wanted to get naked with Henry'.
There are 650 pages of Mantel's novel, already widely claimed as a triumph well worth its £18.99 cover price.
Pen Pusher, which also contains poems by our own Hugo Williams, a 'nineteen bottles of red wine' reminiscence by Simon Callow and an engaging piece on coffee by the paper's editor, Anna Goodall, contains 74 pages and costs £3.75. A subscription is available too.
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