Features

An atom is made of protons, electrons and neutrons, and protons are made of quarks, and a quark is the size of the violin you’d play for a restaurant critic who complains about their job. It’s the best job in the world: go out for dinner on expenses with a friend or a lover, then bash out a thousand words. Why, then, might we feel some pity for our restaurant critics? One reason could be that the Grim Reaper is hovering. Last week, the Evening Standard’s restaurant critic Jimi Famurewa announced that his column was being scrapped, as the paper moves to a weekly edition. Another reason, perhaps, is the lifestyle of a restaurant critic. Earlier this year, the New York Times’s Pete Wells left his column for health reasons: ‘I can’t hack the week-to-week reviewing life any more.

Writers, I hope we can all agree, should be paid for their work. That’s the principle behind the law of copyright, and it has held for more than a century. We owe it to (among others) Charles Dickens and Frances Hodgson Burnett. But what about when their work is quoted by other writers?  You’re allowed to quote only a certain proportion of a work before you need to pay the rights holder This week I published a new book in which I spend a lot of time discussing the work of other writers. The Haunted Wood: A History of Childhood Reading is a canter through children’s literature from Aesop and Anonymous to J.K. Rowling and Julia Donaldson.

My sister died last summer, before her time, at 58. Her death has left me shaken with sorrow and remorse: we did not always get on. The other day I accompanied her daughters and husband to scatter her ashes on the Thames at Greenwich in south London where she and I had grown up. The great muddy waterway would take Clare’s ashes out to sea eventually. People like Liz Truss live in Greenwich now, but in my time the inhabitants were Labour-voting bohemian types. Daniel Day-Lewis (a brattish schoolboy) lived down the road from us on Crooms Hill with his poet father Cecil. At Greenwich Theatre opposite, Max Wall performed his anarcho-comic piano sketches on Friday nights. Claire Tomalin was a near neighbour (as was, later, Jonathan Sumption).

The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the four winds in the wake of a corporate sell-off has stirred predictable fury among Orwell buffs. As in all the best literary rows, the contending roles seemed to be clearly defined from the outset. There were the heroes (Orwell and his many acolytes); there was a principal villain – the publisher Hachette, which had decided to unload its archive, only to find that no single bidder could meet the asking price; there was the agent of their devilry (more about him in a moment); and even some subsidiary baddies, in the shape of a clutch of rare book dealers who are now hard at work flogging off the individual lots.

Last week, if you’d known what to listen for, you might have heard a chorus of miniature whistles in gardens across the UK. Other sounds too: the whirr of pistons, the hissing of steam from valves. Up and down the nation, enthusiasts were fuelling up their model traction engines and steamrollers and raising steam not in celebration, but in mourning. It was a tiny mechanical wake for Mamod, the Birmingham firm which has made model steam engines since 1936, and which has announced that it is ceasing production. It’s estimated that more than 2.5 million engines have been sold by the company over the years. As commerce and government push our behaviours down digital channels, older hobbies don’t register When a beloved brand perishes, there’s rarely a single reason.