 I would like to have been in Cheltenham this week for the Times Literary Festival if my performance partner not been in academic seclusion in California constructing her Sather lectures on what made the Romans laugh.
Synchronised swimming through the classics needs someone at least as experienced on the Cheltenham circuit as Mary Beard.
So there has been nothing like our Greeks vs Romans fun of this time last year.
Instead I've been in London, applauding another distinguished TLS colleague as he won Britain's biggest poetry prize on Wednesday.
Seeing Mick Imlah receive the £10,000 Forward cheque was worth any absence from the fire-eating tents.
There was also the extraordinary first night of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land on Tuesday when the financiers heard the banks crashing and found the exit doors before the tragi-comedy even began.
It would be good to get to Gloucestershire to see Simon Schama tonight. My only contribution to Cheltenham this year has been to review his new book The American Future: A History last Saturday.
In a week of economic woe when Barack Obama has begun to cruise to the presidency on its tide, our top story-telling historian can be happy that his own best hopes for the future - unusually clearly expressed in his book - are coming closer.
Schama and his audience will surely be laughing.
Beard and her Californians are happily looking at laughter.
Admirers of Imlah are thrilled.
The Pinter is packing in the crowds.
All is well with the world.
I
 I spoke to the politician and author, Denis MacShane, this afternoon about the row over the Nobel Prize for literature in the United States.
The prize went this morning to a French novelist little known in England outside the TLS and friends - an award made to the sound of general American grumbling.
The secretary for the $1.4m prize had last week dismissed the US as 'too isolated, too insular' for the taste of the Swedish jury this year.
So a European winner from the continent that Horace Engdahl called the 'centre of the literary world, seemed always more likely than a call for Philip Roth.
The actual choice - of the 68-year old French novelist, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - was less objectionable in the US than some might have been - but still a pinch of salt in the American wound.
Continue reading "Nobel's gift to France" »
 Greetings from The Times Literary Supplement to the new website with the whiff of Waugh.
The first edition of Tina Brown's The Daily Beast has just crackled into our inbox - with wit and a few wasp stings and with even its snappy red-and-black regalia recalling the greatest novel of our trade.
The world is falling around our ears.
So what better day for a beady-eyed sense of 'wow, horror, what happens next?' from the woman whose mind, as long as I have known it, has never stopped asking?
At a time when it is fashionable to be gloomy about journalism as well as the world economy, The Beast is a double tonic.
It is new.
It is full of the sense that things will get better, and that, while they don't, we will have fun finding out why.
Continue reading "Hail to The Beast" »
 Margaret Thatcher never heard the reading of Rudyard Kipling's bitter monologue 'The Mary Gloster' when we were in Bermuda together eighteen years ago.
She was too busy planting trees and talking to her favourite president's successor about life after the Berlin Wall.
Only a few of her accompanying press pack had the time to hang about - as we do - and thus the opportunity to hear an eloquent tour guide outside the house on the island where Mark Twain used to live.
The words streaming from his well-practised lips were from Kipling's poem about the business magnate bidding a death-bed goodbye to his son. It had been one of Twain's favourites - and Thatcher's too I learnt this week.
Continue reading "Lady Thatcher and Sir Anthony G" »
 Our friends in the Literary Saloon say that I might give some 'lowdown' on this week's Translation Prizes.
As the TLS 'frontman' (never been called that before) I am supposed to be reporting from 'behind-the-scenes' too.
The fights, the rows, the sandwiches, the chunky charm of Louis de Bernieres and the delightfully expensive short story he read as his lecture?
Well, how about this?
The organisers always give the frontman a speech to read.
No one could remember unaided all our beloved sponsors, each of our multi-lingual judges, the sole winners, the joint winners, the commended runners up and the order in which they get their white envelopes.
But when I began on stage on Monday night I went 'off message'.
I somehow couldn't say that there was a prize, as written on my card, for translation into THE Greek.
Why THE Greek?
Why not just Greek?
Continue reading "THE 2008 Translation Prizes" »
 It seems only a few minutes ago that I was angry at blogs that told me merely to read articles in newspapers.
Now I like them.
I might even post one - like this one.
There is a fine review in The Sunday Times this weekend by Bryan Appleyard of the book on Traffic that I was blogging about two weeks ago. The TLS review will be a little late - not least because the editor hogged the book to himself too long.
There is also an excellent interview in The Observer with our own Mary Beard about her new book on Pompeii - which comes with illuminating lights on traffic of its own. Check it out.
 A call comes today asking why I haven't accepted that the life of Jesus Christ was invented in imitation of the life of Julius Caesar.
The claim is carried - with only a little adverse comment - in Maria Wyke's new book which I reviewed in the Wall Street Journal this morning.
Ms Wyke is a distinguished classicist and reception theorist. Her book is an analysis of how we have 'received' Caesar's story - from the poetry of ancient Rome to the opprobrium piled upon George W. Bush.
Any reading of Caesar's story has to have some significance for her - and the parallels between Caesar's life and that of Christ have apparently been discussed since the 1980s.
Both are accused of making themselves kings. Both are betrayed by friends. Both wear crowns of natural foliage. Both are deified after death. And there is more.
Perhaps I should have mentioned it
The transformation of Caesar's cult into that of Christ was made, it is said, in Vespasian's reign in order to encourage Jews into the Roman Empire.
In the 'reception theory' form of scholarship it is not necessary to refute such a claim, only to note it with comment.
It is highly notable - St Mark's gospel as corrupt retelling of the Roman civil war.
Read more at http://www.carotta.de/..
Read how I failed to note this received truth in the WSJ this morning below.
Continue reading "Christ was Julius Caesar" »
 "It would be hard to conclude that independence has so far brought Georgia anything other than poverty and shame".
In preparing the issue of the TLS that goes to press tonight, I've just been reading a review we published a decade ago by the distinguished critic, Lesley Chamberlain.
"No sooner had Georgia waved its white, black and magenta flag at the departing Russian oppressor, than it promptly insisted that south Ossetia remain under its rule rather than join pro-Russian north Ossetia. Two weeks' civil war in 1992 then forced the first elected President, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, to flee. He died later in obscure circumstances while planning to retake Tbilisi.
Georgian troops that same year, in a disastrous move, marched into the former Soviet autonomous republic of Abkhazia, which, with Russian help, then expelled 250,000 Georgians.
After the various conflicts had died down, Western aid agencies were obliged to make Georgia a prime relief target. In all the old empire no former Soviet republic had declined more rapidly."
Continue reading "To Georgia: one more perfunctory apology " »
 More on the blogger-frightening roads of India - from Vanderbilt's excellent Traffic (see previous posts).
The best way of getting a driver's licence in Delhi is not to take lessons but to pay an 'agent'.
An American study tracked 822 applicants, a 'bonus' group tasked with getting a licence as quickly as possible, a 'lesson' group given free driving instruction and a standard 'comparison' group.
The 'bonus' group did best in getting a licence but when given a proper test 69 per cent of them failed. Only 11 percent of the 'lesson' group failed.
The people who had the best driving skills were 29 per cent less likely to get a licence than the worst.
'Corruption' the authors of the study reported 'appears to substitute for actual driving skill'.
In Hindi, Vanderbilt writes, the same word also stands for home-made car and a bribe to a government official.
A 'jugad' is a both a motorcycle-fruitbox hybrid and the baksheesh needed to get a permit to drive it.
The danger in Delhi is, in any case, much less to any car driver than to other road-users. While more than half the road fatalities in the US are among drivers and passengers, in the Indian capital it is only 5 per cent.
The rest of the roadkill is pedestrian in nature. Camels are not separately counted.
 The ancestors of my fellow road abusers in southern Italy drove on the right too - though lacked the luxury of 'sorpasso' lanes.
Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic (see previous post) cites an American 'traffic archaeologist' called Eric Poehler whose name and job-description were both - shame, shame, I'm sure - unknown to me before.
He has apparently analysed the 'directionally dignostic wear patterns' on the streets of Pompeii and discovered evidence of both driving on the right hand side and a familiar-sounding system of one-way streets, roadworks and carriage-free zones.
If two carriages arrived simultaneously at an intersection, who went first?
Vanderbilt poses the question but doesn't say whether Poehler or anyone else gives an answer.
The most brazen and the boldest, like now, I imagine.
For a firmer answer on this perhaps, and assuredly much else, I'm looking forward to consulting the imminent book on Pompeii by my friend and fellow blogger, Mary Beard, last heard from dodging camels on the drive-on-the-left motorways around Delhi.
 A few days on the roads of Naples heading south makes there only one book for me in the TLS pile now that I'm back home.
Traffic, the way we drive the way we do (and what it says about us), by Tom Vanderbilt.
Look up the author's references to Italy and there is - not surprisingly - a rash.
Left-lane driving on the autostrada is reserved for passing and 'for many drivers in the left lane their entire trip is one epic overtaking, a process know as il sorpasso, a phrase heightened with additional meanings in social mobility.'
So now I understand.
'Get in the way of someone in the midst of a sorpasso and they will soon drive so close that you can feel, on the back of your neck, the heat of their headlights'.
Ah, yes. A Fiat Punto Diesel, my sluggish companion through some of the obscurer classical sites around Reggio Calabria, is especially vulnerable in this regard.
This flashing is 'less a matter of aggressiveness than incredulousness (sic) at your violation of the standard'.
So that's OK then.
Continue reading "Flash, flash, poop, poop" »
 A book has turned up on our TLS shelves called 'Gerald Ratner, The Rise and Fall . . .and Rise Again'.
The author is Gerald Ratner.
I missed his story the first time around.
I didn't intend to read this new version. But it was peculiarly compelling. Somewhat belatedly, I have just finished it now.
So I understand better the 'Crapner' tag that appears in the press whenever a journalist wants to refer to carelessly, hubristically self-destructive act. In the current state of British politics and business that is quite often.
It is a very strange tale.
Continue reading "Gerald Ratner: timing is everything" »
 Publishers have many reasons for dissatisfaction with their authors - but few get the opportunity to arrest them.
In 1943 Rupert Hart-Davis had barely signed up Julian Maclaren-Ross for a book of stories when he found himself consigning his signing to a Southend gaol for desertion.
Hart-Davis was a Coldstream guards officer descended (albeit illegitimately) from William IV, while Maclaren-Ross was a parade ground member of the awkward squad.
The young author's defence document was a hitherto unpublished tale of army life 'I had to go absent' which TLS readers can consider later this week.
Maclaren-Ross wanted to query why 'an intelligent man of 31, travelled, educated abroad, sophisticated and an anti-fascist, a writer who can write over seventeen stories in spare time and get them published, cannot be utlilised, owing to his medical category, in any better capacity than an office boy in an orderly room'.
He asked Hart-Davis to defend him - but ended up in a military psychiatric hospital outside Birmingham, 28 days gaol and a discharge.
An outrage.
How many publishers since then, in difficult economic times like these, with advances paid out and no book coming in, must have mourned that there is no longer a decent war on?
 Cherie Blair's autobiography leaves all sorts of lingering questions - apart from the ones of tone and taste raised by almost all reviewers, including me in the Globe and Mail, Toronto.
There is the moment when she discusses the origins of the name of constituency home which she and Tony Blair bought after his last-minute selection as a Labour MP in 1983.
It was called ‘Myrobella’. This was ‘not one of those unwieldy conjunctions of the owners’ names as I had supposed, but a variety of pear which grew in profusion in the garden’.
Fine.
The book shows her great interest in property and this is a nice vignette of a proud householder pondering an aspect of her house.
Except that the ‘myrobella’ is a plum not a pear.
And on the only time that I ever visited Myrobella, I asked the same question and I was shown just one plum, not a profusion but, heck, what's a few trees between friends?
How do we explain the fruit confusion?
Perhaps she always called it a a pear tree and no one ever dared to put her straight.
Perhaps she was never there when the difference beween a plum and a pear is most clear.
Perhaps in Cherie Blair's mind it is an unimportant distinction.
Perhaps it is unimportant. And to anyone who says that the plum pictured here is not a 'Myrobella', I am sure you are right. It is the only google-plum I can find. That cannot be her excuse.
If the distinction betwen plum and pear is deemed unimportant, what others in the book are?
Perhaps she simply never got round to reading that bit.
Hard to say.
For probably the most favourable review of the book so far - lest overseas readers think that all of Britain is asking unreasonable questions of Mrs Blair - read Michael White's review in the TLS which we will be sending to the printers a week tomorrow.
 Some bits of Cherie Blair's memoirs strike all the wrong notes, as many reviewers have pointed out.
The tone is toxic at times. That is true.
But there is a charming account of Mrs Blair's time as a nude model in the late seventies, knitting tea cosies as gifts for the artist, Euan Uglow.
As she describes the scene, the two met at a dinner party of Derry Irvine, her legal boss, later Lord Chancellor, who was a serious art collector and, as she less than admiringly describes, an even more serious consumer of fine wine.
Uglow was a well established painter with a fine reputation for female nudes. She was then a junior and not fully employed barrister. Tony Blair, to whom she was not yet married, was there too.
She writes how she never thought she would have to pose naked for her £3 an hour - but when he handed her an open fronted, waistcoat-like 'blue dress' which he had himself designed, she did not feel she had much choice.
She was to be a 'striding figure'.
Continue reading "Not in Cherie Blair's book" »
 "Towards the end of 1995, I woke up one day to find I’d become a sex symbol."
Thus does John Prescott remind us of his finest 'front page' hour in The Times.
John who?
British readers of The Times will not need reminding. For any that have forgotten there is a brilliant recollection by my friend, Mary Ann Sieghart in the paper this morning.
Readers overseas may have lived for the past decade wholly without knowledge of Mr Prescott, Trade Unionist, notorious strangler of the English language, Britain's Deputy Prime Minister throughout the Blair era and author of a new memoir from which the 'overnight sex sensation' memory is taken.
Suffice now only to say, just as we did on Page One, on Tuesday December 5, 1995, that:
"JOHN PRESCOTT, unlike Tony Blair, has never won any plaudits for his smooth good looks and photogenic charm.
Until now. For Labour's deputy leader and former merchant seaman now finds himself cast in the unlikely role of a sex symbol.
In A Political Kiss, a new poem published in the latest edition of Poetry Review, the quarterly magazine of the Poetry Society, Fleur Adcock, 61, the New Zealand-born poet, describes a sexual fantasy in which she dreams of kissing the tough-talking face of new Labour."
Continue reading "John Prescott and the kisses of fire" »
 I am anticipating a little trouble from the issue of the TLS we are sending to the press tonight
We know that Austria is not filled with domestic dungeons in which evil fathers – with full planning permission – abuse their daughters for decades at will.
Vienna’s anxious politicians are keen to tell us so.
Josef Fritzl’s fathering of seven children on his gaoled daughter over twenty four years could, it is said, have happened anywhere.
Doubtless it could.
Yet the history of the Austrian novel – from the teenage cellar girl with enlarged head (1852) to a two-roomed underground prison with musical instruments (1911) – suggest something of a pattern to our distinguished writer and critic, Ritchie Robertson, not forgetting, of course, the contribution of Sigmund Freud to the genre.
The piece is will be online later tomorrow.
 London Underground bosses objected earlier this year at a nude portrait of Venus being used to promote the Cranach exhibition at the Royal Academy.
There were fears that it might be defaced by outraged Islamists and others whose sensitivities were more to themselves than to art.
For anyone who wonders what such a defacement might have looked like, this is a cover of the TLS containing Timothy Hyman's excellent review, sent by a reader from eastern parts (not a renownedly extremist realm) after it had passed through the local security forces.
Someone has worked really hard at this.
Such a bikini and skirt do not come wihout effort - even pleasure perhaps - on the part of the penman.
And he was not even waiting for a train.
 A new edition of Dracula has arrived to darken an otherwise bright day in London.
This is an improvement on most days in the past few months when a bright book has been needed to break through the dark.
Any reader of these blogs who has been following Mary Beard on early lesbianism will be pleased to see recognition in Dracula's Capuchin Classics foreword for a 'dreamy tale of Lesbian vampires', Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novel Carmilla.
This fine work predated Bram Stoker's oeuvre by a quarter of a century - and became the source of various 'sexploitation' movies in more open-minded years.
One of Mary's 'commenters', my old friend Oliver Nicholson, has pointed out that the OED gives no instance of Lesbian or Lesbianism in its modern English sense earlier than 1870.
It was possible for a respectable family in Willesden as late as 1898 (presumably admirers of Catullus, 'tenderest of Roman poets') to name their daughter Lesbia; she grew up to be Lesbia Scott, wife of a vicar of Chagford and author of an All Saints; Day hymn of great charm, "I sing a song of the saints of God".
Thankyou for that, Oliver, as ever.
I wonder how many girls in Chagford in the 1870s were christened Carmilla.
 The creator of James Bond, I have learnt, was a devoted TLS reader.
The TLS has received many commendations in its 106 years of publication - or promotional endorsements as we know them now.
But that from Ian Fleming, mentioned in an article by Andrew Lycett, which we are getting ready for this week's paper, is a sentence to warm any marketer's heart.
"An essential item in my desert island library would be The Times Literary Supplement, dropped to me every Friday by a well-trained albatross".
I won't spoil the story by revealing how this work of literary ornithology came about.
Strange to relate, we have also dug up a letter to us from Fleming, commending the TLS for criticising the illicit use of his name for advertising purposes in France.
We made a mistake in that piece - and he criticises us for that too.
But I'm sure his spirit would not mind our using his albatross for advertising ourselves now.
We are also republishing this week Fleming's only review for the TLS.
Everything will be up on the website on Wednesday.
 My favourite book programme turns up on Radio Four on a Sunday afternoon when the wonderful Mariella Frostrup brightens the darkening driving hours.
She treats all the self-publicists who turn up on her Open Book with the same nice mixture of amusement and respect. Britains' writers and publisher do not know how lucky they are.
So surely an author should not mislead Mariella except for the best of reasons?
Yesterday the novelist Will Self, merely promoting his new novel, Butt, gave an account of how he came across the word 'tontine', a key theme apparently of his Butt.
His explanation was hard to believe and came with no immediately obvious reason at all.
Continue reading "Mariella and Will" »
 I was sure I had a copy somewhere of a newish book on Archytas of Tarentum, the philosopher-king and friend of Plato who invented the jet-propelled pigeon.
My esteemed colleague, Mary Beard, came to the TLS office yesterday afternoon and I challenged her with 'borrowing' it, an unwise challenge as was clear from her frosty look.
Why did I want a book on a mathematician who 'doubled the cube' - whatever that is? What was I on about?
It is true that numbers have never been my favourite signs.
Nor is the science of southern Italy in the fourth century BC Professor Beard's favourite topic.
So, why did I want my book on Archytas? And why did I think she might have taken it?
The answer is all about what one does in the theatre during the passages of a Shakespeare play whose gist one loses for a minute or so, the parts that an aggressive director normally cuts out but which Michael Boyd of the RSC on Thursday night did not.
Continue reading "Who's got my bloody Archytas?" »
 This year’s Olympics organisers must be inviting only sinophile sinologists, I suppose.
So there’s been no invitation to me yet to discuss the state of life and letters in mysterious parts of China before the drug-fuelled runners, jumpers and strutters do their stuff in Beijing this Summer.
Too bad. I guess that we TLS classicists have already had our turn.
Four years ago, in the weeks before the Athens Olympics, we had our tour buses to Delphi and our talk of this and that, formally on the theme of why once upon a time Greek literature was the greatest thing and why hardly anyone read what Greek writers wrote today at all.
Seamus Heaney was with us. And another much valued contributor of poems to the TLS, the American poet, Rachel Hadas.
But the poet I remember best from those day was one I didn’t know before at all.
Continue reading "So potent was religion in persuading . . . " »
 He once stole Iris Murdoch's typewriter because his need, he said, was greater than hers.
He made most of his money from exploiting his friendship with George Orwell - and he hated the truth of that.
When the poet Paul Potts died in 1990 the Times obituarist noted his Dante Called You Beatrice as 'one of the most truly romantic confessions of the century', noting, however, that 'the prose becomes the poetry he feared he could not write'.
Potts was a disappointed man of Soho in an age when disappointed artists famously filled the places that money-splashing tourists fill now.
Before the days of street pornography - that advance celebrated everywhere in the obituaries of Paul Raymond who died this week - there were pubs where poets hawked their wares and lived off alcohol and each other.
Such is the accepted version of what went on. And alongside Tambimuttu, Dylan Thomas and George Barker at the bar there was Paul Potts.
He is often described as born in Canada but was instead a man of Datchet.
He is most remembered now for poetic failure and being 'irascible and light fingered'. It does not do to steal a lady novelist's typewriter.
His name does appear sometimes when some other Soho bohemian dies - when those typewriter-and-Orwell stories turn up in the life of a film-director who did not make many films but drank alot and was memorably attractive to women.
Fortunately it is not just the death of Paul Raymond who brings old Soho to mind.
An unusual catalogue has arrived from the bookseller-writer, James Fergusson, offering 'two working manuscript notebooks' by Potts with a 'further archive of typescripts, manuscripts, letters &c [1939-48]. . ring-marked and a little soiled'.
Fergusson describes Dante called you Beatrice as an 'extraordinary hymn to unrequited love' while noting, as is de rigeur for the Soho school of failure, that it 'was intended to be a new Unquiet Grave'.
His short bill of sale is a contribution to literary scholarship in itself - as is the rest of the catalogue in which it appears, a memorial to the Oxford bookseller, Robin Waterfield , whose biographical sketch by Fergusson, not available online as far as I can see, is a thing of bald beauty.
The catalogue is available from jamesfergusson@btinternet.com, price £5.
The price for the Pottsiana?
£1,750.
Which in pre-Paul-Raymond days would have whiskied-and-watered its author for months.
 Everyone should have another world.
Everyone should have another place, imagined, created, recreated, where they feel at home.
I had thought that one of mine was Homer's Odyssey - and that poem's own odyssey into the modern mind.
I enjoyed reading Alberto Manguel's book on this theme - and spent a gentle hour or so saying so last week to the readers of my friends in the excellent literary section of the Toronto Globe and Mail.
And then this weekend I began another book which arrived at the TLS last week.
Erica Wagner at The Times had asked me to look at Edith Hall's 'The Return of Ulysses, a cultural history of Homer's Odyssey'' - and today, Spring-cold by The Thames, I have done just that.
Cheerfully too - although I had planned to spend the time on another Roman part of my 'most comfortable ancient worlds'.
And then fine books on the reception of Homer - like those suitably mythical London buses - always coming in packs.
Never mind.
It is sometimes particularly clear to me why I admire so many classical scholars - and why we appraise so much of their work in the TLS.
Edith Hall's book has added to those reasons.
The range of her inquiry - and its detail, from George W. Bush's odysseys to the mystery of the orgasm and back - adds to my sense of knowing what I already saw, quite wrongly and unreasonably, as already mine.
And, so far, I have read barely a half of it.
 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.
 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.
Continue reading "Elephant in the bedroom" »
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.
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.
 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.
Continue reading "Sex lives before the Saturday feature" »
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.
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.
 Just occasionally, in a life full of words, there are words that you think you should have heard before, known before, felt before.
If you're editor of the TLS ( OK, no 'ifs'), you think (I think) you (I) should even have published them before.
Alan Jenkins has an office next to mine at the TLS. As it happens, we are moving offices tomorrow and we shall be a few feet further apart. But that is of no consequence bar being true of the here and now.
He has been with the paper much longer than I - though we arrived among the glass and grey slabs of 200ish Gray's Inn Road at about the same time in 1981, I to The Times, he to the literary cousin we both share now. He is a poet.
We share a love and care for the TLS - and another care, for rivers, The Thames for me, for him other rivers I think, though perhaps the Thames too.
I've known for some time that he was writing a poem, maybe more than one poem, about boats and water.
We spoke about Pope's Windsor Forest a while ago and about the Moselle of the Latin poet Ausonius, about which I know a little and from which Pope borrowed a few Thames lines.
His new little book, Drunken Boats, has already been published and purchasable for a few weeks. Our diarist JC, not one to promote a colleague's book beyond its merit (that is not how we do things here) has already praised its renderings of Rimbaud (above), an achievement that is beyond this classicist's power to judge.
My own copy, purchased from Sylph Editions, arrived only this morning, battered somewhat by the weight of Christmas cards around it.
The opening poem, Salt, has occupied me for all this evening of that arrival day.
I'm not going to quote from it. There is strict injunction against doing that without permission. And this is a blog. And speed is all.
I'm not going to 'close read' or criticise it in some other way which many in the TLS family could better do.
I'm not going to imagine how Alan will receive these words. I'd never write half a line about him if I did that.
I'll just say that it has been a wonderful evening with the poem so present, the water so present and with the absent poet seeming so present.
TLS rules discourage us from publishing in our paper what is already available to be read and bought.
So buying and reading is all I can encourage anyone to do.
Continue reading "Drunken Boats" »
 Why did Scrooge become a miser? Can ghosts speak without a jaw?
Consider these and other often unanswered questions about A Christmas Carol in our interactive online guide to the greatest seasonal classic.
Dickens left alot of loose ends in his story.
Our TLS leader on this quest, the novelist and poet Will Eaves, explains why.
Join him.
Ask questions of your own.
I'm sometimes asked if the TLS has a Christmas spirit at all.
We're not strong on holly or reindeer but yes we do.
This is it.
 A sympathetic friend in Australia reads my last post and says that there is a famous painting of avian revenge against the beast that last week stripped the windpipe of my garden swan.
The painting is of a scene adapted from Aesop's fables in which an eagle feeds a fox-cub to her young in retaliation for bird-catching abuse.
The artist is the seventeenth century writer and illustrator, Francis Barlow.
My friend, like many others apparently, has the Barlow image on a modern mass-produced vase.
In the picture the fox tries to rescue her cub by setting fire to the tree where the eagle has its nest.
The eagle seems to have a satisfying determination to ignore the smoke and turn the fox into baby food regardless.
Which, to assuage my memory of the foxy murder by the Thames two weeks ago, is an excellent result.
Continue reading "Eat the fox cub" »
 Ten days ago I woke at 6 am and saw a sleeping animal shape on the path by the river, big enough to be a deer but lying awkwardly like a round fur puddle.
Then half of it got up, a huge fox with a white-tipped tail, and then the other half, a paler vixen.
I returned to sleep, wondering for no good reason how such a fox would fare against the large flocks of swans which share these Thames banks.
A swan's wing is a better known weapon for we river-dwelling humans than is the fox.
It packs a heavy-feathered punch.
Hard to say how a clash would go, I decided.
Two hours and a walk to the waterside later, the reason for the beasts' sleeping and the human waking was clear.
My foxes had been resting from a dawn of clinical destruction.
A large swan, a favourite swan, had only a bloody windpipe where a foot-length of its neck had been.
Apart from that neat red blemish it was was untouched - dead, perfect, ready for fox breakfast.
This worried me more than it should.
I'm not a natural countryman. Ridiculous as I seem to myself, I somehow think that beautiful swans and equally beautiful foxes should just get on.
 Stupid but heck.
Yesterday a substantial and impressive book arrived at the TLS which showed what should have happened.
'Birds' by Katrina Cook has the size and scale that the great collectors of bird paintings demanded in the past.
There is MacGillivray's Sandpiper, Audubon's Ivory-billed Woodpecker, Tunnicliffe's Song Thrush - in the sort of dimensions that their artists intended.
And on the opening double spread, 'The Threatened Swan' painted in 1650 by Jan Esselyn, reproduced very poorly above.
This magnificent creature was not going to be fox food.
Any beast with a white-tipped tail would have been beaten to retreat.
This book is going to stay open at these pages until the opposite reality has subsided.
At £50, in these Christmas present times, the perfect answer to other anxieties too.
 I've just answered questions from a fellow team of bloggers who not only asked for a favourite cocktail but for a favourite choice of objects from the British Museum.
OK, I did that. Results available later. Don''t try my pet drink at home.
But why stop at the British Museum? What would I put under my arm if I had my personalised dutch courage, a bag marked 'swag' and the free run tonight of every museum in the world?
Number One prize would be a very old Greek pot, the so-called 'Francois Vase' in Florence, one of the oldest that we (by which I don't mean I) possess.
A funerary urn for two?
Continue reading "Best thing in any museum? The gay tomb vase." »
 After decades of living in North London, meeting politicians (too many) and writing about politics (too much), I'm beginning to feel for the first time that I'm genuinely represented by one.
No, not Glenda Jackson, the movie-star-turned-axe-face-of-the-old Left and my veteran Member of Parliament here in the Hampstead part of Camden. There is still some way to go before the House of Commons itself has anything for me.
No, not Lord Adonis of Camden Town, the former Andrew Adonis, the closest thing to a natural TLS-reader in the Blair and Brown governments. His choice of title for his appointed place in the Upper House of our legislature, while pleasing, does not make him strictly any representative of mine.
I do, however, have a local Councillor. He is called Alexis Rowell, a Liberal Democrat, an environmental campaigner, a blogger, a man with a wormery in his garden and good advice on electricity suppliers - and, mirabile dictu, he deals with his constituents about what is happening in the streets around us.
He genuinely represents.
Continue reading "A worm's eye for politics" »
 'Norman Mailer is dead and we were wondering if. . .'
I was driving into Berkshire last night when the ancient mobile phone I borrowed from my son six weeks ago, the one that still isn't Bluetoothed to the car, began to splutter with where-the-hell-are-the-talking-heads requests to drive to TV stations to talk about 'one of the great English stylists of the century'.
Or that's what I'd have said if I'd accepted any of the offers.
I was en route to dinner, running late, with my screenwriter friend Paul Webb, who I knew was an even bigger admirer of Mailer than I, and who had spent a memorable evening with him several months ago.
I told the enquirers that I was driving - which, these days, is the way to get anyone off the phone.
So Paul and Carolyn, his wise wife, and I spent the evening in a bit of Mailer-land, with Paul recalling the glories of Ancient Evenings, the 1983 novel of the Egyptian Pharaohs, and me remembering only where I'd read it not anything much of what it said.
The TLS was a rare admirer of that book at the time. I wondered how many people in England other than Paul could properly talk of it today.
Apart from Mailer's throat-grabbing style, and the few familiar points that everyone else makes this morning, I'm not sure what else I'd have said about him. It takes a while to put a dead artist into some kind of perspective. And at the TLS, as we do, we will take a little while.
I couldn't even remember the long conversation he and I had had in 1991 about his CIA novel Harlot's Ghost - or why he'd written in my black-and-white oriental-patterned proof copy, smudged beside the computer now, some words about the 'right height' of a tennis net.
I know I'm not supposed to do this. Blogging abhorrs the repetition of print journalism from the past. But rather than snip and cut some bits, this is the talk with Norman Mailer, published, with all its now obvious flaws, in the Times Magazine of October 12, 16 years ago.
Continue reading "Mailer: I know I'm not supposed to do this but. . " »
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I would like to have been in Cheltenham this week for the Times Literary Festival if my performance partner not been in academic seclusion in California constructing her Sather lectures on what made the Romans laugh.
