The TLS blog

Ring 0870 343 1001 for Spartacus

Boris Johnson wrote a wonderful review of my On the Spartacus Road book last week in the Mail on Sunday.

Or so I have been told.

I was looking for it online but could only find a story about how the classical enthusiast and Mayor of London had been reading it to steady his nerves on an icebound aircraft on the way back from Davos a few weeks ago.

And even that was hard to find beneath a story about how Madonna was trying to stop her ex from getting model jobs.

But readers in or around Oxford on Friday at noon are invited to come to the Sunday Times Literary Festival at Christchurch and hear for themselves.

Jane Jakeman is going to be asking me the questions. Online booking - like Boris-reading - has been closed but tickets can be bought  at the festival site or in advance by ringing  0870 343 1001.

Victory at Trafalgar

Like most people who admired last night's Olivier-winning play, The Mountain Top, I did not see it at the Battersea pub theatre highlighted in all the media  this morning, the place where this account of Martin Luther King's last hours began what must now be an assured path back home to an America that had previously spurned it. I saw Katori Hall's play instead at the Trafalgar Studios in the shadow of Nelson's Column, quite a bit closer to London's bright lights than the tiny Theatre 503, not so much off-off-off the West End as at its very closest edge.

This is not just an observation for theatrical tourists but of theatrical economics too. When On the Mountain Top  becomes an  American hit - and for many ways, for its theatrical art as well as for its revisionist portrayal of Dr King, I think it will - we will hear much more, I suspect, of the 'log cabin to White House' narrative that fills today's papers and which publicists like so much. The notion of little London pub-play that lit up Times Square will be powerful and irresistible, a bit more palatable too than stories about a 'great play about Dr King that America at first found too hot to handle'.

The Trafalgar Studios are an artfully constructed set of stages inside the old Whitehall Theatre which used to be the home of Brian Rix and trouser-dropping farce, the place where many up-to-town-for-the-nighters (including this one as a schoolboy) saw their first London shows. Not everyone was thrilled when Howard Panter and Rosemary Squire, co-founders of the Ambassador Theatre Group, turned it into what it is today, a test bed for taking risks and putting new work, some of it found in pubs, before wider audiences without the risk of a full West End run. The Olivier Awards last night were not just a triumph for 28-year-old Katori Hall from Memphis and director, James Dacre, but one more well deserved ovation for that conversion call.

Lanterns, eggs and Spartacus

"I've read your blog but what's the Breaking of Eggs book actually all about?" was the complaint at Daunt Books on the Marylebone High Street in  London last night where we were celebrating the publication of Molotov's Magic Lantern by our distinguished critic, Rachel Polonsky.

OK. Apologies for brevity and vagueness. I was just off the plane from the Berlin streets where some of the many fine parts of Jim Powell's novel are set. And my mind was already more filled with Polonsky's magical and magnificent story from Moscow.

Fortunately, I was able to say that this week's TLS gives a fuller version by Lesley Chamberlain of why Powell's book is worth the reading on any eastward plane journey - or any other journey. Polonsky's book, as we say, will be reviewed in a future issue.

Incidentally, I note that one advantage of the printed copy of the whole TLS over its online parts is that one can turn over the page of a review and find a useful advertisement on the back. On the reverse side of Chamberlain's review of Powell, for example, is an invitation to readers to hear the author of On The Spartacus Road in conversation at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival on Friday, March 26.

Join me if you can.

 

Berlin eggs and other errors

I have become mildly addicted to the anthology Rags of Time, a commonplace book, one of the most beautiful I have ever held, created by my old friend, the former Conservative Cabinet minister, Kenneth Baker.

Before leaving for Berlin at the weekend, I turned inside its gold-red-black cover, as though into an Edwardian hamper, and found  Churchill's less than prophetic remark in his first cabinet post that 'look at it from any point of view you like, and I say you will come to the conclusion, in regard to the relations between England and Germany that there is no cause of difference between them'.

And there, on the same page, there were three quotes on British indebtedness, one from Gordon Brown in 2007 predicting net borrowing in 2009 at £30 billion, a second from Alistair Darling in 2008 putting the same figure at £118 billion, and a third from the same Darling in 2009 itself extending the number to £175 billion.

Another old Conservative literary friend, from what now seems a very faraway age, is the former Chief Whip, Richard Ryder, a man who in no way ever fitted  the description of that role offered by Sir Robert Peel, and cited by Baker, that it was a place requiring a gentleman to fill it 'which no gentleman would take'. Of various of Ryder's successors. Peel might easily and appositely have been speaking. But let that be by and by.

From the desk of the distinguished former Whip came an excellent recommendation for Berlin reading which shortened the flights in both directions. The Breaking of Eggs by a 61-year-old businessman, sometime political hopeful and pottery-seller, Jim Powell, is a first novel of the Cold War recalled after the falling of the Wall in 1989, with characters whose hopes and predictions were universally as poor as Churchill's, Darling's and Brown's, a perfect preparation for the weeks of electoral promises that stretch before us now.

Kenneth Dover de mortuis

"I do not spare the dead, nor do I expect to be spared when I am dead", wrote the great Sir Kenneth Dover whose excellent obituary appears in The Times today.

Not many classicists write a 'sensational' biography. Nor was one expected in 1995 even from the pioneering author of 'Greek Homosexuality' and the famously frank and independent leader of St Andrew's University, the British Academy  and Corpus Christi, Oxford.

But Dover's Marginal Comment caused a sensation  - not only for its frankness in so many personal and public respects but for its justification of doing so. 

In the opening chapter, he set out his general approach to feelings: "I accept responsibility for my actions and words, and my processes of rational thought can fairly be judged competent or incompetent. For my feelings, desires, fears and hopes, I accept no responsibility at all; they simply happened to me, like health and sickness, good weather and bad."

Hence the unusually honest record of his reaction to the suicide of a troublesome Oxford colleague, Trevor Aston, his candid admission of previously worrying  "how to kill him without getting into trouble" and his statement that he "had no qualms about causing the death of a Fellow from whose non-existence the college would benefit". Next morning, after the event, " I got up from a long, sound sleep and looked out of the window across the Fellows' Garden. I can't say for sure that the sun was shining, but I certainly felt it was. I said to myself, slowly, 'Day one of the Year One of the Post-Astonian Era'."

As Bernard Knox pointed out in the TLS at the time, Dover's account of what he calls "The Aston Affair" caused much comment, most of it adverse.

"To those who have had to preside over a residential institution of higher learning, fantasies of violence and murderous intentions are not unknown; they can even flourish in a situation where contact is limited to class-room and committee meeting," Knox wrote.

But, even by friends and admirers, objection was taken to Dover's expression of relief that Aston had killed himself, the expression of his own wish to have done the deed, his justification of that wish and his relief when the job was done. 

All classicists living today would be the poorer today if Kenneth Dover had never lived, as the obits properly acknowledge. But there is also this remarkable account of himself, "the sober, cruelly honest record of a life of devoted service to humanistic education", the kind of record which truly illuminates a man's death.

Maverick Sabre from the Roundhouse

From the Roundhouse recording studios in Camden, North London, comes a song that should sweep the world. Well, yes, in my view, it should. I can already hear the complaint that the Editor of the TLS should step back from tipping songs. But, I've begun and, since 'They Found Him A Gun' has not left my head since I first heard it yesterday, I'm sticking to my 'should'.

This is a song about classroom shootings, about 'fight or flight' in our own local streets and others' streets, and if a sweep of 'the world' is perhaps too much to predict, it should echo and re-echo across the Atlantic to Virginia Tech and Columbine and surely will.

The singer and writer is the nineteen/twenty year old, Irish-Londoner, Maverick Sabre, about whom there is only a certain amount of reliable information on-line and nothing like as much as there will be soon. There's a somewhat scratchy video version here which gives some idea of the song but the double CD on which I found it last night, being a TLS Editor unfashionably unattached to downloadings, was put in my hand by Marcus Davey, the director who inspires so many of the great things that happen there.

ThirtytrihT is set of thirty songs recorded in the Roundhouse studios that sit under the brick and great-bowled roof of the rock and theatre venue that was once a gin-store and turn-table for steam-engines. We had had a trustees meeting  - and doubtless discussed a good deal about Roundhouse money, Roundhouse bars and future projects to help the young make music, movies and something more of themselves than they otherwise might achieve in a culture of state education that offers and expects so little.

But I don't remember very much of that this morning, with Maverick Sabre hammering in my head.

Michael Foot, TV pioneer

Those making tributes on the radio this afternoon to Michael Foot who died today, have become fond of saying that he was 'not a man of the television age'. For the crisp sound-bite, the artful biopic movie or the best coat to wear at the Cenotaph he was certainly not ideal. He was a TV pioneer nonethless.

 A biography of A.J.P Taylor, reviewed in the TLS a few years ago,  described how Foot and Taylor Bob Boothby and other panelists on the talk-show In the News in 1950 propelled themselves to fame, warming up at Albany in Piccadilly, with "some refreshment" supplied by their chairman, Edgar Lustgarten, then ambling round for a meal to the Ecu de France, before being driven to the studio, whence, after some technical preparations, "they were off for another break, this time in The British Prince, a pub at the end of Lime Grove".

 At length they went on air for half an hour's discussion, after which it was off to the director's flat to view a recording of the programme "over a nightcap". They got paid, too