The TLS blog

Nick Clegg's island

Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, was 'the castaway' on Desert Island Discs this week. I only heard the end of the Friday repeat - where he was asked about the one book 'apart from the Bible and Shakespeare'  that he would take with him for the period of forced isolation that so many in his own Lib Dem party would like to see.

'The Leopard', he promptly replied. The questions have been the same on this show for decades so he knew he had to have a name ready.

By Lampedusa, he added, halting slightly over the pronunciation. Since Mr Clegg is famously multi-lingual, this was perhaps to reassure the listeners that he is a true man of the British people.

He told us that he had recently reread it - and enjoyed it as much the second time as the first. So it would be the perfect book for further re-reading when he was faraway from the hurly burly and no longer supporting David Cameron in policies which most of his party members came into politics to oppose.

'It's set in Sicily, I think', he added.

He thinks?

He's read it twice and he only 'thinks' it is set in Sicily.

No wonder he still feels it has hidden insights which only desert island concentration could provide.

Meanwhile he will certainly enjoy the forthcoming Alma Books volume of unpublished letters from London by Lampedusa, which is to be reviewed soon in the TLS.

   

 

  

Simon Hoggart's wonderful Long Lunch - with W.H. Auden, Kudu Piss and a Gorilla

Last night could have been a terrible night - for all sorts of reasons not quite right for a blog or, at least, not right quite now.

But I had Simon Hoggart's book of episodic memoir, A Long Lunch, to read. Christmas is coming (and there is still Halloween to be survived) and if any friend, you think, needs a lift, this present will not disappoint.

Hoggart is the political sketch-writer for The Guardian. For American readers unfamiliar with the role, it is the one long filled at The Times by Frank Johnson (see my review of Best Seat in the House from last year). Sketch-writers tend to be the wisest as well as the wittiest of political writers - and Hoggart has been Johnson's successor as doyen of the trade.

Last night it was the non-political passages that cheered the most, the Martini recipe which WH Auden gave him as a child, the journey by which the name Death Cab for Cutie left the pen of his father, the literary critic, Richard Hoggart, and ended up, via the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, as a cult act on the American West coast.

There is minimal comment on the cult bands but Auden, it seems, slightly disappointed the Hoggarts by drinking the bottle of wine which in those days was thought quite enough for table of three - as well as the bottle of gin into which the young Hoggart had mixed the necessary thimble full of vermouth - and then concentrating his conversation on the virtues of the Kenwood Chef food mixer. He was, however, gracious in using greaseproof paper to copy the Observer crossword so that the Hoggarts could enjoy the puzzle after he had left.

Rare cocktails of Africa are lovingly described, including the Gorilla (take one inch of orange juice in a pint jar, add beer to within an inch of the rim, top up with whatever spirit is indicated by a coin thrown at random behind the barman and enjoy) and Kudu Piss, a flourescent brew made of Rhodesian pastis and American green cream soda (it really does glow in the dark).

The world of journalism (as to all great journalists) remains a mystery to this master of its arts being, as he puts it,  'similar in many superficial ways to the real world, but also deeply different, rather like those planets the Star Trek crew visit, in which the atmosphere is identical to ours, and for some reason everyone speaks English, except they breathe through gills or have purple skins'.

And all that before we get to Margaret Thatcher and the Princess of Wales and what (I don't yet know what) Alan Clark said about Melvyn Bragg.

 

YMCA - A!

On the last night of what seems a long journey selling the virtues of the TLS (and some copies of Spartacus Road) I am at JFK airport watching on TV the same baseball match I was watching last night at Yankee Stadium.

I don't know anything much about baseball (as I type, the Yankees are 'coming back from the dead' but that is merely the view of the man next to me at this computer-stacked bar). What I remember most from last night in the Bronx is the singing, which includes a rendition of that gym-dance song YMCA, at a moment both  predetermined by tradition and not quite clear to me.

I'm pleased that Deborah Porter, the glamorous chair of the triumphant Boston Book Festival, has deemed our discussion of Spartacus, Cleopatra, Achilles and other movie-star ancients to have been 'one of the most popular sessions that people were raving about'.

That was 'a pleasant surprise'. she told the Boston Globe.

The audience did indeed seem pleased to have heard Stacy Schiff, Caroline Alexander and your blogger talk about truth and reputation in ancient history. All credit to my colleagues.

But at the end of this book festival journey I am not quite so surprised about a classical success as Deborah may have been.. 

One of the lessons to me from the last six weeks - from Wigtown in Ayrshire to Henley on Thames, from Cheltenham, Gloucestershire to Boston, Massachusetts and Bloomsbury - is how great is the modern passion for engaging with the ancient world in different and surprising ways.

My highlight is still the 'How to read a Latin Poem' session at Cheltenham where TLS contributors, Mary Beard and Llewellyn Morgan, helped a big crowd through a difficult pice at 10 am on a Sunday morning.

Wow! Here at JFK, the Yankees are even further 'back from the dead', 5-0 ahead, and in stadium that is only one colossal, colosseal reminder of what today's warriors owe to the past.    

Byron buys the TLS

This picture is the proof (courtesy of our commercial director, Jo Cogan, left) of the great TLS Boston Book festival subscription drive.

(Or it would be if I could upload it from my machine: full picture-service may have to wait; for the time being just imagine the picture, big TLS banner, Copley Square grass, hundreds of enthusiasts at a wonderful free festival of books)

With the help of our  T-shirted team (thanks everyone) we handed out copies, met current subscribers and signed up new ones. 

The editor will forever have a special thought for the new lady subscriber who accepted our offer of a free signed copy of my Spartacus Road on condition that I inscribed it to her accompanying dog, Byron, who, it seems, normally prefers science fiction but was prepared to make an exception on Saturday for the TLS.

Almost as surprising was the promotional picture in the back of the cab from the airport which showed the face of my old friend and former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, as a star writer of Boston.

The face on the screen was very clearly the man from faraway Scotland who resigned from Tony Blair's cabinet over the Iraq War and died shortly afterwards although, as in the case of the TLS-selling team, you will have to take my word for it.

There is, however. a Boston writer called Robin Cook who writes novels about reassembling body parts. His most famous is called Coma. I wonder if he knows how reassembled he has become this week in the back of Boston cabs. 

   

Whisky for parents: Latin for all

 

It was the sight of the Highland Park promotional team handing miniature scotches to the parents queuing  for Jacqueline Wilson which made the first weekend of the Times Cheltenham Literature Festival so memorable.

Well, one of the things, anyway.

While audiences inside the tents were being swayed by the severest novelists and historians, the line for entry to the child-world of Ms Wilson was like a character in a fantasy itself, long, snaking, mostly young and patient and fortified, at the older age levels, by plastic cups of what I'm told (not being a whisky drinker) is a most magnificent malt.

Thanks to Mary Beard, who has already described some of our classics events, the words of 'laudabunt alii' and 'odi et amo' were displayed on large flashing screens over the scotch lawn. A friendly crowd came to hear me talk face to face about Spartacus Road with Ramona Koval who normally I talk to only over thousands of miles of air and sea on the ABC Books Show in Melbourne. The poet Statius, who has a starring role in that book got a decent vote in the Ancient Booker: since, of all the writers on the short-list, he was the one who most cared about winning prizes, he would have been disappointed with his champion, I am sure. So, sorry, Stace (the name by which Chaucer knew him).

Tonight we have the real Booker. And tomorrow with the TLS and Spartacus Road to the Boston Book Festival, boosted (lest even without whisky excess I might begin to flag) by a very welcome review by Frank Wilson in the Philadelphia Inquirer today.

On the Bloomsbury to Boston via Cheltenham road

In a few hours Mary Beard and I will be talking about On the Spartacus Road at the British Museum before heading off to the Times Cheltenham Literary Festival where Mary has organised an impressive range of classical events.

There is going to be a mass class in reading Catullus and Horace in Latin (not the usual literary festival fare) and various of us fighting (not illustrated here) about who would have won a rather widely construed 'Ancient Booker Prize'.

There will be Spartacus Road again too - with Ramona Koval of the Australian ABC Book Show. And after that the TLS, this time without Mary, goes to the American East Coast for the Boston Book Festival, meeting readers as well as discussing history and myth, Spartacus and Achilles meet Cleopatra as it were.  
 
If I get to the BM early enough tonight, I'm keen to stop by again at one of the most extraordinary discoveries in Britain in the past twenty years, the collection of late Roman gold and silver known as the Hoxne Treasure, found in a Suffolk field in 1992 by a man with a metal detector who was looking for his friend’s hammer.

This week in the TLS Kenneth Lapatin elegantly traces our changing attitudes to the very word “treasure” while reviewing the BM’s newly published account of the massive hoard of coins, condiment-holders, jewellery and toothpicks once carefully stored by a wealthy family in the years before Roman power faded and fell. Among routine inscriptions of Christian piety is the hope that the recipient of a “stunningly pierced gold bracelet” may “use it and be happy”. We may even know the owners’ names – although one of them at least seems to have been very strangely spelt.

 The “friend’s hammer” has not been discarded. It is displayed in the museum as a significant part of the discovery, its context, something from a later time that illuminates the meaning of what came before. Such application of 'reception theory' is not popular with all visitors. Although the central “battle to establish reception as a legitimate, indeed essential, part of Classics has long been won”, there are constant skirmishes about what is truly relevant and useful and  what is merely fashion. I suspect we may face some of the same issues in Cheltenham and Boston too.