Culture

Steven D. Levitt was a Harvard economist who specialised in politics and spent a lot of time watching cop shows on TV. Then he had an idea: why not switch from politics, which he found dull, to crime? Soon he was studying the crack cocaine economy. Stephen J. Dubner was the guitarist in a rock band called the Right Profile. But he didn’t like the rock’n’roll lifestyle; he was a bookish type. So he became a journalist, got a job at the New York Times, and found himself interviewing a go-ahead Harvard economist who had written interesting stuff on the crack cocaine economy, among many other fascinating things. This, of course, was Levitt. Dubner made a suggestion: why not write a book together, based on Levitt’s work?

Competitors rose admirably to the recent challenge to step into the shoes of a well-known writer and submit a poem or piece of prose in praise or defence of something unexpected. It was nice to glimpse a lighter side of Leonard Cohen courtesy of Martin Parker’s twist on ‘Bird on a Wire’, and Alanna Blake submitted a well-made Wordsworthian tribute to wind farms. Ernest Hemingway came out for the League Against Cruel Sports and against sobriety, and in J. Seery’s entry Barbara Cartland showed her true Marxist colours: ‘There is no phrase in English more sensuous than “dialectical materialism”’. Other stellar performers were John Samson, Josephine Boyle, C.J. Gleed and Jamie Burnham, who restyled Arthur Ransome as a health-and-safety nut.

The Spectator's latest debate - Stop Whining Young People: You've Never Had It So Good - was most disgracefully skewed in favour of the proposition. Not only did the epically relaxed moderator Toby Young flagrantly and self-confessedly side with the proposers but so too did the event sponsor, Alan Warner of Duncan Lawrie private banking. Warner recalled, in his introductory speech, how very difficult it had been as a young man coming to terms with the fact that he would never be able to afford to live, like his parents' generation, in Chelsea. Instead, he had to venture to the exotic reaches of the Angel, Islington and had to endure years of taunts on the lines of 'Well I know where it is on the Monopoly board. It's the last pale blue cheap one before you get to the jail'.

‘No, no’ I said, when The Spectator’s literary editor rang up, ‘I’m sure you must be able to find someone who really wants to read another postcolonial analysis of the figure of the North African in English literature.’ But the book turned out to be about the other kind of moor, so I said yes, though not without some anxiety that it might be like Eeyore’s Gloomy Place: Rather Boggy and Sad. Luckily, William Atkins’s book, though it acknowledges that moors can be bleak, isolated and unforgiving, especially for permanent residents and those scraping a living off the land, is on the whole quite cheerful.