Culture

The British Library isn’t the first place I associate with contemporary fiction. For me, it’s about the Tudor manuscripts: the support and expertise of the manuscript room staff is second to none, and to the academic mind, few thrills compare to finding Elizabeth I’s distinctive handwriting on an unexpected document, or deciphering treacherous correspondence in a prayer book. But DBC Pierre it sure ain’t. Yet under the alert leadership of Roly Keating, the man who put BBC Four on the map, the British Library is now carefully fostering a commitment to living writers, not merely the dusty and dead.

A week or two ago, author Philip Hoare wrote an article for the Independent, describing Derek Jarman as ‘a modern-day John Dee, the Elizabethan alchemist’, ‘an Edwardian Andy Warhol, a Victorian Jean Cocteau’ (huh?), and, inevitably, ‘a national treasure’. It’s symptomatic of the way that artists, writers and celebrities of a certain age haven’t been able to stop themselves gushing over his vision, his garden in Dungeness and how absolutely lovely he was. They don’t ever talk about his films, though – and with good reason. Maybe I’m missing something marvellous, but I’ve just suffered Blue, Jarman’s self-conscious Definitive Artistic Statement, for the third time in five years.

Spectator literary competition No. 2840 You were excellent this week on the horrors of the reunion dinner. But these gatherings no longer have the allure they once enjoyed. While in days gone by, they offered the opportunity to see, and, more enjoyably, to assess, former classmates in their adult incarnations, in an age of social media no one really loses touch and that element of mystery is all but gone. We’ve seen the pictures and read the status updates. Albert Black, Rob Stuart and Peter Goulding are all highly commended. The winners take £25 each and the extra fiver belongs to Alan Millard. Alan Millard ‘Good evening, sir, wind down the window      please, Perhaps you’d like to tell me where you’ve been.

‘On the whole I think you should write biographies of those you admire and respect, and novels about human beings whom you think are sadly mistaken,’ said Penelope Fitzgerald in 1987. The South African novelist Damon Galgut has reversed this formula — with mixed results. He has written a novel about a fellow novelist, E.M. Forster, using episodes and quotations taken from a conscientious reading of biographies, diaries and letters. He salutes Forster as a writer and commends his humanity; but it is not clear whether he thinks Forster was sadly mistaken in his sexual bearings or lame in his choices.

I yearn for expertise, in the way that only an arts graduate can. At university I learned how to read books (as long as they were written in English). But now, two decades on, people who can read books (as long as they are written in English) are not quite such the hot ticket that they used to be. It's an outrage. No wonder I envy those who have honed and sharpened their talent, rapier-like, into something that can be wielded usefully in life. What good will my dim recollection of sonnet form do me? The people I particularly admire are those who have set their heart on some really specific skill and put in the hard yards. Microbiologists, say. I look up to them in the way that small boys look up to fathers who know how to tie 18 different kinds of knot.

Spectator literary competition No. 2839 The recent call to coin collective nouns for tweeters, hackers, hoodies, WAGs, environmentalists, bankers, MPs and contrarians pulled in a record-breaking entry and there were lots of unfamiliar names in the postbag. Inevitably, there was also a fair amount of repetition: nest/cacophony/outrage/triviality of tweeters came up more than once, as did skulk/huggle/scowl of hoodies; bonus/wad/wunch/trough of bankers; knot/perversity/Hitch of contrarians; vacuum/bling/surgery of WAGs; flood of environmentalists; expense of MPs; to list just a few.

Whatever happens to David Cameron, he will have some reading material post 2015. Dr Anthony Seldon has announced that he will be writing about the Cameron years, just as he did for the Blair and Brown premierships. Seldon plans to publish two books: The Cameron Effect, written with Dr Mike Finn, and Cameron at 10, with Peter Snowdon. Both will be released after the election. Seldon is not the only scribe documenting the life and times of our chillaxing PM; former Sunday Times Political Editor Isabel Oakeshott has revealed more details about her book (co-written with Lord Ashcroft): ‘When I interviewed the Prime Minister for the Sunday Times at New Year, I was struck by a casual remark he made.

The traditional story told about the first world war is that it changed everything: that it was the end of the old world and the beginning of the modern age, and that art and poetry could never be the same again. So it is refreshing to find, not far into Lance Sieveking’s amiable and haphazard memoirs, the claim that ‘I didn’t realise it at the time, but in 1919 I was a comparative rarity: a complete young man, a man with two arms, two legs, two lungs, two eyes.’ He had fought in the war, and came home unscathed, and that was that. Airborne: Scenes from the Life of Lance Sieveking is a slightly otherworldly book: a collection of agreeable stories drawn from a colourful life, all told with good humour and very little fuss. It reads like a document from a lost time.