Books

A school in Greater Manchester has stripped 193 books from its library because they are ‘inappropriate’, liable to upset pupils and thus a safeguarding risk. Among the dangerously destabilising material: Michelle Obama’s memoir and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Who was entrusted with identifying these literary IEDs? An over-zealous head? A prurient librarian? A demented child psychologist? Nope. A humble AI bot. While writing my latest novel, The Hawk Is Dead, much of which is set in Buckingham Palace, I asked ChatGPT to produce a simple floor plan. Not a tough assignment – much less taxing than diagnosing nearly 200 books as existential threats to adolescent wellbeing. It got the Palace’s orientation wrong. For more than 200 years, the East Wing has faced the Mall.

Every couple of years a columnist-cum-novelist will inevitably stoop to shameless self-promotion. In my defence, at least the novel released this month is germane to the political moment. Lest its simple title, A Better Life, come across as lame, I asked the designers of my British and American hardback covers to use imagery that conveys the book’s focal subject matter: immigration. See, proponents of unfettered mass migration have eternally assured us that most illegal immigrants – or as the Biden administration instructed federal law enforcement to call them, ‘newcomers’ – are merely seeking ‘a better life’. This explanation is routinely trotted out as an irrefutable justification for a potentially near-infinite imposition of foreigners on western polities.

It was only recently that I fully appreciated how the books I read as a child formed me. A pregnant friend asked me about my parenting philosophy and I realised it amounted to ensuring my son would survive a tour of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. I never had the money of Veruca Salt’s daddy to indulge his every desire, but I came down hard on chewing gum, gorging on chocolate and, above all, staring at a screen.  Despite my son’s complaints that I was acting like a father from Victorian times, it seemed to have worked, and, as the Oompa--Loompas predicted, not being glued to a screen encouraged him to become a reader, out of boredom if nothing else. If the house was quiet, too quiet, I would usually find him reading a book in a corner.

Independent bookshops remain some of Britain’s loveliest places. Quaint, charming, precarious, they are a bulwark against blandness and offer refuge in an age of doomscrolling. The bookseller stacking the shelves is likely to be local, almost certainly poorly paid and a bit moth-eaten. I should know – I own an independent bookshop. We are a flock of sheep, which is why it has proved so easy for a wolf to slip into our clothing. Walk down a high street today and you may well pass a bookshop that looks just right. Handwritten recommendation cards. Tastefully curated tables. Knowledgeable booksellers. The name over the door reassuringly local. Nothing here suggests scale, leverage or distant ownership. You may feel a small glow at having rejected Amazon.

There’s a myth that lots of us fall for/ ‘Kids’ books are so easy to write’/ And you can see why we might think so/ As so many of them are shite. Little poem by me there. As the dad of a six-year-old and a three-year-old, I have spent perhaps 100 hours reading some wonderful books, and hearing gorgeous books read to me. But parents everywhere will know what I mean when I say: Christ there’s a lot of dross out there. Why are so many children’s books so bad? Children learn through books. If they read lazy poetry, they’ll become lazy writers and lazy thinkers While looking for kids’ books to name and shame for this piece, I realised that some of the very worst offenders are now in a charity shop or the bin.

Queen Camilla loves a book. Almost any book will do. ‘There’s something so tactile about a book,’ she says. ‘I like the smell of the pages when you open the cover. I like turning the pages and folding down a corner ready for next time…’ The Queen, 78, has loved books for as long as she can remember. She says her father, Bruce Shand, inspired this lifelong passion: ‘He read to us as children. He chose the books, and we listened. He was probably the best-read man I’ve come across anywhere. He devoured books.’ Bruce Shand was a soldier. His father was a writer, about architecture, food and wine. His father was another writer, who, incidentally, was briefly and secretly engaged to Constance Lloyd, who went on to marry Oscar Wilde.

If you like your period dramas butchered, then you are in for a real treat. The 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth falls on 16 December, and we are promised a slew of adaptations, documentaries and lectures to mark it. Inevitably, some of these will try to put a ‘new spin’ on Austen, to make out that she was somehow in line with a particular cause or interest of modernity; Mansfield Park is about saving the whales, Colonel Brandon is actually trans, that sort of thing. This year, Emma Thompson stars in a ‘racy’ new audio drama, Becoming Meg Dashwood, which will focus on the youngest Dashwood sister and her quest for ‘female friendship, sexuality, and liberation’. Oo-er.

A few years ago, I watched an Irish-made drama on Netflix called Rebellion. Given that it was about the 1916 Easter Rising, I expected it to be somewhat anti-British but was pleasantly surprised. I knew the basics of what happened, but the series made me question why I knew so little about Irish history and politics more generally. I could name each taoiseach (prime minister) going back to Jack Lynch but, apart from Eamon de Valera, none before him. So I began to read voraciously about our nearest neighbour. Having edited books about British prime ministers and American presidents, I decided that one of the (now) 16 men who have held the office of taoiseach since 1922 might make an interesting project.

Given the way the world is right now, I am avoiding it in the main. For the sake of my mental wellbeing, I require less bad news and more fun company. Just as George V collected postage stamps and Rod Stewart collects toy trains, I have been collecting theatrical dames since the beginning of the 1970s when I first worked with Dame Peggy Ashcroft. It’s an odd hobby, but it has proved hugely rewarding. From Dame Flora Robson (who gave me a very useful book on window boxes when I bought my first flat) to Dame Joan Plowright (who bequeathed me her husband Laurence Olivier’s favourite sun hat, which I’ve worn with pride all summer), I have bagged more than 50 of them over the years. I recently had lunch with one of my favourites: Dame Eileen Atkins, 91.

Jilly Cooper, the last great Englishwoman of my lifetime – after Queen Elizabeth II and Debo – has died. The lights are going out all over Rutshire. During her life, Jilly shone as an author, a friend and a person – the definition of effervescent. You had to meet her only once to become a founder member of the Jilly Cooper Adoration Society. When she wrote her last book, Tackle!, about a rural football club complete with ‘bitch invasions’ and ghastly Wags, I told her that, in a way, she was the beautiful game, only she gave entertainment to millions not by striking a ball but by putting one word in front of another on her ancient typewriter, Monica. (A friend told me she liked to write topless in the garden, with a glass of wine.