Parsimony

This book got glowing reviews when it was published in the US a few months ago: ‘Irresistible’ (New York Times); ‘Riveting’ (Boston Globe); ‘Energetic and engaging’ (Washington Post). I kept wondering if I was reading the same book. You wouldn’t have thought it possible to make the Rolling Stones boring, but Bob Spitz somehow manages to. Let me count the ways. By giving his own programme notes on every Stones record; by paying far too much attention to the actual recording process and crediting every new sound engineer; and by totally missing the point that it is the Stones themselves we are interested in. I’m fairly typical of diehard Stones fans in that I got hooked in the 1960s and have stayed with them ever since. I am now 82.

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).

Samuel Pepys didn’t much like the subject of Dennis Sewell’s new biography. Sir George Downing (1623-84) was for a short time Pepys’s boss at the Exchequer, during which period the diarist observed that his employer was ‘so stingy a fellow I care not to see him’. Despite being one of the richest men in Restoration London, Downing’s parsimony was legendary and was the subject of one of the Diary’s most celebrated comic anecdotes. Having recently purchased a country estate in Cambridgeshire, Downing learned that it was customary for the landowner to host a Christmas dinner for the poor of the parish.