Literature

The Honorary Ottoman

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:36:43 +0100

Author:Noel Malcolm

Bernard Lewis: Consulted by presidents

May 1916 was a propitious time for the history of the Ottoman Empire — that is, for the historiography of it, not for the historic existence of the empire itself, which was about to come to a decisive end. For, by an extraordinary coincidence, the two greatest modern historians of the Ottoman world were born that month, less than a week apart: Halil Inalcik in Istanbul on May 26 and Bernard Lewis in London five days later. Even more extraordinarily, both are still going strong, in the middle of their tenth decade. It's almost as if the leading experts on Victorian England today had been born in the reign of Queen Victoria.

The Answer Lies in the Soil

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:22:39 +0100

Author:Caroline Moorehead

When we moved to the country in 1996, my small children were "townies". In the first weeks of their new life, they came running to me in dismay. Our neighbour was felling hornbeam in the nearby wood. "Doesn't he know," they said sorrowfully, "that cutting down trees is wrong?" They had learnt at nursery school an environmental song (chorus, with gleeful pointing of childish fingers: "Shame! Shame! Shame on YOU...") and absorbed the unthinking belief that Nature is Good and everything man does to it Bad. Many, perhaps most, nature programmes promulgate the same view, where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile.

Jottings of a Journeyman

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:16:44 +0100

Author:Louis Amis

It seems fundamental to the nature of The Odyssey that it should be forever reworked and retold. The world it describes scarcely admits a definitive account of events: whimsical gods appear in dreams or in daylight, as themselves or in disguise. They invade men's minds, or spirit them away wrapped in clouds, leaving lifelike phantoms behind. And through this world travels Odysseus polytropos, the man "of many ways". He comes sometimes bravely, sometimes cringingly. He fights honourably, and treacherously; he speaks humbly, or with hubristic pride. He is both blessed and cursed, both right and wrong. The only constant is his love of lies, tricks, pretence and of not revealing himself — and he, this most unreliable witness, narrates a large part of The Odyssey, his own story, himself. It's a story that doesn't just allow alternate versions, but implies them in almost infinite number.

Artistic Licence to Kill

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 16:16:33 +0100

Author:Lionel Shriver

I've been dreading this, since it was only a matter of time: some creep would go on a murder spree with a crossbow.

That's the weapon of choice for the school killer in my seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. The 15-year-old spurns a gun, which he considers obvious, ordinary and less demanding of skill than a crossbow, so his selection of this lethal yet legal implement is carefully calculated to distinguish him from the run-of-the-mill. After all, high-school massacre is classic "attention-seeking behaviour", just as the juvenile grotesquery of Stephen Griffiths's alleged murder and dismemberment of three prostitutes was doubtless designed to grab headlines.

Save, Save and Save Again

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:57:06 +0100

Author:Frances Weaver

In 1834, Thomas Carlyle, encouraged by his friend John Stuart Mill, embarked upon The French Revolution: A History. A year later, the first volume, The Bastille, was sent to Mill so that he could make notes on the manuscript. However, a servant either at Mill's or at his mistress Harriet Taylor's house apparently mistook it for waste paper and put it on the fire. Only four tattered leaves were saved from annihilation.

Nabokov in Berlin

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 14:25:39 +0100

Author:Lesley Chamberlain

Nabokov in 1936: Berlin suited him until the Nazis, like the Bolsheviks before them, drove him into a second exile

Forbes at the Festival

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:29:15 +0100

Author:Allan Massie

Adam Forbes, a Scots writer, unable for reasons he had never defined to live in Scotland, or indeed to write much, was an unlikely person to have been invited to speak about Scottish literature at a festival — itself equally improbable — held in a small town in the Tuscan Maremma. He had never heard of the town, and the region, which he didn't know, was associated in his mind with a shaggy white sheepdog and with a book — a novel? Short stories? Essays? — by Ouida. He had never read it, but could picture where it had stood, brown-covered, on a shelf in his second wife's bedroom. It might still be there, though it was he, not Arabella, who had bought it.

Yes, Of Course I was Wired Weird'

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:00:49 +0100

Author:Chris Woodhead

Outside, a waterfall from a blocked gutter flowed down the kitchen window. Three sodden and rather stately sheep trooped by in single file. Geoffrey looked at me across the table and nodded with satisfaction. "I love weather like this," he said, "Don't you?"

I nodded back. You don't, after all, buy a farmhouse halfway up a Welsh hillside for the joys of perpetual sunshine. He finished his coffee and picked up one of the black notebooks in which he writes his poetry. "I am," he sighed, "very, very tired."

New Poems

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 12:55:08 +0100

Author:Geoffrey Hill

SEI MADRIGALI

Is it not strange that thou shouldst weep? So gravid
The sweetest song a burdening: the six
Metamorphoses, of violence and sex,
The sensuous oboe touched by sensual Ovid.

Pan pipes, the syrinx, the Orphic lyre;
The waters of the mere, reedy and full;
Poignant the false-relationed madrigal;
The hunter poised, the watcher with the lure.

The heron's flight out of the reeds is laggard
Yet still it climbs. You could have watched its slow
Navigation of the risen dawn,
Its neck drawn back, prehensilely long-legged,

But you were probably asleep, and I
Display too late my early grief. Too late
Pinions of holding lift and agitate.
The heron crests its high-reared heronry.

Git Lit, or: Why Old Age is All the Rage

Frances Weaver — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 11:28:38 +0100

Author:Piers Paul Read

My charming, beautiful, articulate and witty daughter-in-law, Catherine Ostler, who edits Tatler, had a sneak preview of my new novel, The Misogynist, and told me that it belonged to the genre "Git Lit" — at the other opposite end of the spectrum from "chicklit". She was too polite, or too mindful of the importance of irenic relations within a family, to call it a "gaga saga".

The publishers are happy with this categorisation. They put the novel's protagonist, Geoffrey Jomier, in the company of other "grumpy old men", no doubt hoping to entice the admirers of Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils, which won the Booker Prize in 1986, or those who have enjoyed the recent novels of Philip Roth. Or Justin Cartwright. Or Ian McEwan's Solar?