Culture

Philip Glass is by now surely up there in the Telemann class among the most prolific composers in history. There must be an explanation, preferably a non-defamatory one, for how his technique has enabled him to produce such an enormous quantity of music. A glance at my iPod shows that Varese’s collected works are over in 150 minutes: Berg, Ravel and Debussy each managed to produce between ten and 15 hours of music at most. Glass’s style, which has been called ‘minimalist’, though he doesn’t accept the label, works on a bigger scale. He has written 25 operas, some, like Einstein on the Beach, as long as Die Meistersinger. He owns up to 30 film scores, although the internet movie database connects him with more than a hundred different films.

Salman Rushdie became embroiled in a literary row over the weekend after he rated a number of books on the website Goodreads thinking these would be private when in fact the information was viewable to the public. The Satanic Verses author's list soon began to circulate online with many viewers aghast to read his mediocre three star rating of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird alongside the singular star given to Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. Other critically acclaimed books that ranked low include Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart and Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. F Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby did at least manage to make the grade with a full five star rating.

In the manner of Richard Holmes’s Footsteps, Julia Blackburn’s story of John Craske is as much autobiography as biography, as much about the hunt for information as the processed results of the search. The facts of John Craske’s life are briefly told: born in Norfolk in 1881 into a fishing family, he suffered some sort of mental and physical breakdown while training with the army in 1917 and for the remaining 25 or so years of his life dodged in and out of invalidism, sometimes bedridden for long periods, sometimes out fishing with his brothers, sometimes working as a fish merchant and perpetually supported and nursed by his devoted wife, Laura.

In his 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper Philip Meyer predicted that the final hard-copy newspaper will plop through someone’s letterbox in 2043. So who’ll be the first to go? In the latest competition you were invited to imagine that one of the major newspapers has ceased publication and provide a verse lament for it. A couple of you submitted entertaining entries in the style of William McGonagall, poet and tragedian — take a bow, David Silverman and Carolyn Thomas-Coxhead — and my head was also turned by Brian Murdoch, who didn’t seem overly sad about the demise of the Guardian. Over to D.A. Prince, who pockets £30 and her fellow prize-winners, who earn £25 each. D.A.

George Gissing’s The Whirlpool was originally published in 1897. In this shortened version of the foreword to the new Penguin Classics edition, D.J. Taylor argues that its author is ‘the last great Victorian novelist.’ In the early summer of 1896, hard at work on the manuscript of what was to become The Whirlpool, George Gissing struck up a connection with the Jewish novelist Israel Zangwill. A natural solitary, wary of unburdening himself even to the friendliest male associate, Gissing seems to have decided that Zangwill, author of the best-selling Children of the Ghetto, was a suitable repository for his confidence.

There are man-haters everywhere, it seems, from children’s telly to high culture. Charges of sexism have been levelled against the creators of the Daddy Pig character in Peppa Pig — daddy is portrayed as a hopeless bumbling idiot while Mummy Pig is the embodiment of good sense — and the literary critic Harold Bloom argues that there is ‘a strong element’ of misandry in Shakespeare (whereas misogyny, he says, is hard to find). The latest challenge invited you to climb aboard the bandwagon and compose an extract from an imaginary novel written from the perspective of a female chauvinist author.

As Johnny Rogan notes in this new biography of Ray Davies and the Kinks, it is almost 50 years since the term ‘Swinging London’ was first used by a newspaper to describe ‘the most exciting city in the world … all vibrating with youth’. Those smashing times may not have lasted long but the vibrations carry on to the present day. Happily, many of the protagonists are still with us — David Bailey, Mary Quant — and so is Ray Davies CBE, part of the swinging city scene but apart from it too. The Kinks were a superb proto-rock group but they were also, in the words of George Melly, ‘brilliant piss-takers’.