Books

The cover blurb, from “Lady Anne Glenconner” on this huge book proclaims: “Brilliant. Tina Brown has inside knowledge and writes so well.” The credit for the author of the 2019 bestseller, Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown should in fact be “Lady Glenconner”. You might not think it matters much these days that, over and over again, Tina Brown gets the titles wrong in this book. But this is supposedly the ultimate insider’s look at the royal family over the last forty years or so. And titles are at the heart of the Firm — think of the agony of Prince Harry and Prince Andrew at no longer being able to use their HRH titles and having to give up their honorary military roles.

When John Keats wrote “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” he had just returned from a long evening at the home of a childhood friend, Charles Cowden Clarke. Charles Clarke was the son of the headmaster of Clarke’s Academy, where Keats had gone to school. A week earlier, Clarke had introduced Keats to one of his heroes, Leigh Hunt, editor of the independent Examiner (Hunt was imprisoned for two years for printing that the Prince Regent was “a fat Adonis at forty”), friend of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, and literary kingmaker. Hunt despised what he viewed as the overly ornate poetry of Alexander Pope, preferring instead Chaucer’s earthy Old English and the directness of Shakespeare and Milton.

It’s hard to move on the literary internet — or that nest of inky vipers, literary Twitter — without coming across a piece that expresses one of two opinions: the first, that men don’t read literary fiction and that this limits their understanding and experience of the world; and the second, that the figure of the heterosexual white man has been crudely and cruelly excluded from the literary debate. “Bring back our Roth, our Amis, our Updike,” these commentators cry, as if they hadn’t received enough acclaim and attention in the past few decades, and if reading them had become illegal rather than just moderately unfashionable.

Matt Sienkiewicz and Nick Marx try to do a couple things in their new book, That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them. For starters, they hope to show their liberal readers — and the book is clearly written for those on the left — that there is such a thing as “right-wing comedy.” It is not an “obvious oxymoron,” as many on the left assume. Conservatives’ “post-9/11 blunders” made them easy targets for the left-leaning (and increasingly left-wing) Saturday Night Live, Stephen Colbert, and David Letterman. While comedy and “left-wing oppositionality” seemed a “blissful marriage,” there is no reason to assume the “eternal, exclusive nature of that union.

I didn’t want to review Dave Rubin’s Don’t Burn This Country. One Dave Rubin book seemed like enough — arguably too many — for a lifetime. Yet like a burglar who retires from his life of crime only to pass a mansion with its doors wide open and the glint of jewels beyond the hallway, I was pulled in again. Just one more job. In case anyone has never heard of Mr. Rubin, he is an interviewer and commentator who began as a mildly left-wing contributor to the Young Turks and then drifted towards the “anti-woke” realms of the “Intellectual Dark Web,” where his talk show became a hub of the phenomenon as he interviewed anyone and everyone who didn’t like “safe spaces” and blue-haired transsexuals.

"Oxford I do not enjoy,” wrote T.S. Eliot to Conrad Aiken in February 1915. “The food and the climate are execrable, I suffer indigestion, constipation, and colds constantly.” The poet was clearly having one of his bad days. Since arriving at the university the previous October, he had found himself in and out of love with the place, which was hardly surprising, given the timing. Most of the undergraduates at Oxford had either left or were on the verge of leaving to fight for their country, meaning that the lecture and tutorial rooms were almost empty, the sports fields green through lack of use, and the centuries-old traditions stalling like motor cars on the long stretch of the High.

“Women Dominate Shortlist for International Booker Prize,” reads the headline of Alex Marshall’s Thursday article for the New York Times. He notes that five of the six books on the shortlist this year were written by women. The novels do look interesting — I haven’t read Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob or Jon Fosse’s latest in his New Name series and want to pick up both — but it’s hardly news that women “dominate” the International Booker. They have dominated every major literary prize in the last few years. Four of the last six winners of the International Booker have been women. While winners of the Booker (not the International Booker) over the last six years are split right down the middle, women outnumber men twenty-two to fourteen on the shortlist.

Americans are about to get what they desperately need: another book from the Biden family! Valerie Biden Owens isn’t just the president’s little sister; she's also the author of Growing Up Biden: A Memoir. The book’s cover features a photo of a young Valerie and her siblings sitting on a couch with their mother. According to Amazon, the book "details Valerie’s decades-long professional career in politics, and the central role she played in her brother’s life as an insightful adviser, an ever-loyal advocate and best friend.” The timing of the book’s release — it will hit shelves next week — is almost as terrible as Joe Biden’s recent poll numbers. Almost.