Books

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.

‘To be or not to be’ may be the question but when it comes to eliciting answers, I’ve always preferred Mr Darcy’s epic conversation starter: ‘What think you of books?’ Two hundred years on, it has become harder than ever to find out what anyone actually thinks of books – and not just because our attention spans have been so corroded by dopamine addiction. There are more books published today than ever. TikTok creates relentless literary sensations, and the day after the murder of Charlie Kirk, AI-produced histories were available on Amazon giving ‘the full story’.  If social media is to be believed, everyone is reading so much it’s impossible to keep up. But what matters most is not what you think about books but how your books look.

It’s that time of year when the local librairie-papeterie in your French holiday village is full of signs for la rentrée and English newspapers carry ads for gel pens and shoes with Velcro fastenings. I used to love this season as a schoolboy – discovering if I’d made the under-13 football training squad. For the past 40 years, though, September has been for me a different season: the time of the publishers’ launch party. These used to be lavish affairs, held in a hotel or gallery with themed drinks and food, the whole thing fizzing with romantic possibilities. In 2001 we had a memorable do for my American novel On Green Dolphin Street with a jazz quartet, cheeseburgers and bottomless dry Martinis. (What happened afterwards in Vauxhall Bridge Road has stayed in VBR.

A recent photograph on a BBC website startled me. It was of hundreds of books thrown out of a former library in Croydon on to the ground.  It startled me because I had taken an almost identical photograph 34 years before – in Liberia. The books in the University of Liberia had been pulled from their shelves and scattered in similar fashion to those in Croydon. Of course, the books in Liberia were at a higher intellectual level. The capital city of Monrovia was in those days cut off from the rest of the country by the forces of Charles Taylor, and the only way to arrive was by the Steel Trader, a ship owned by a redoubtable old Africa hand, Captain Monty Jones, responsible, at his risk and profit, for revictualling the besieged city.