Lord of the Flies

Wednesday

Andrew Roberts

The sartorial decline of the House of Lords

There is a moment at the beginning of Lord of the Flies where the shipwrecked children realise that the adults have all been lost and they can now descend into savagery. Much the same thing has happened sartorially in the House of Lords since the hereditary peers were expelled. The thin veil of civilisation has been ripped aside and now anything goes. Ties are optional, with Lord Davies of Brixton saying, in that snobbish way reserved to socialists, that nowadays they are only worn by ‘estate agents and funeral directors’. I was delighted to see Baroness (Joanne) Cash pointedly wearing a tie at the despatch box the next day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Thursday

Oliver Soden

The making of William Golding as a writer

It is hard to believe that the 1983 Nobel Prize in Literature would have been awarded to the author of titles such as The Chinese Have X-Ray Eyes, Here Be Monsters or – yes – An Erection at Barchester. But if William Golding had had his way, so it might have proved. Charles Monteith, his loyal editor at Faber & Faber, saved him from himself; and thus it was that those books were called instead Pincher Martin, Darkness Visible and The Spire. For whatever reason, Golding thought himself a monster and his journals seethed with self-disgust Even Golding’s first and most famous novel, Lord of the Flies (1954), started life as Strangers from Within. Its publishing history is almost as well known as its plot (of boys stranded on an island turning savage).