Culture

When Richard Mabey was researching this biography of Flora Thompson, author of Lark Rise to Candleford, he happened to stay at a farmhouse B&B near Bath. Ambling around, he found something very curious ... There were two rows of cottages facing each other, with a dusty track between them ...There were clean curtains in the windows. The gardens were in good order, with sweet peas in flower and rows of fat cabbages. It was a vision of an English village as idyllic as a Helen Allingham painting ... I edged round the back and realised they were two dimensional ... a façade but nothing behind.

Shelfie [n.]: a bookshelf selfie Has the shelfie replaced the selfie as the most fashionable use of a camera phone? I’ll admit it; I’m a fan of the odd selfie. What better way to record a social occasion — so everyone knows you were there — than to take a squashed photograph at arms length with your nearest and dearest? It’s become so popular even our politicians are partaking in a cheeky selfie. The Prime Minister is known to have taken at least three selfies, including a disastrous one at Nelson Mandela’s funeral, while Ed Miliband has been seen huddling beside Joey Essex. But the new trend of the shelfie is the perfect antidote for the chattering classes who find a selfie simply too gauche.

Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to its title. It’s the name of an online game, set in Jack the Ripper’s London. Six players — five teenagers and an elderly man — inhabit their personas with fanatical fervour. They switch their forensic attentions to modern San Francisco when the corpse of a security guard is found obscenely displayed in a high-school gym. The father of Amanda, the group’s games master, is the deputy chief of San Francisco’s homicide department. Her divorced mother is Indiana Jackson, a Reiki healer whose patients are often more interested in her Barbie-doll good looks than in her holistic techniques.

I apologise for writing a blogpost about a tweet, which can look a bit like over-analysis, but I was intrigued by a couple of things that writer Graham Linehan wrote last week. Writers tend to the left because writers tend to have compassion. The nasty party has none so the BBC will never be just right for them. — Graham Linehan (@Glinner) February 7, 2014   Also, reality has a left-wing bias, and writers tend to deal with the real world. — Graham Linehan (@Glinner) February 7, 2014   He was responding to some complaints about bias on the BBC, and as Linehan has written some brilliant television comedy, his opinion is listened to.

In 2004, ten days after I moved my family to a new life in India, I gave a reading at a small palace on the edge of the ‘pink city’ of Jaipur. Fourteen people turned up, of whom ten were Japanese tourists who had got lost. The next year, I helped organise a modest literary programme of 18 authors. Two failed to arrive, but with the aid of my co-director, Namita Gokhale, we gathered a respectable audience of nearly 100. Eight years later, however, by some strange yogic sleight of hand, the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival has shape-shifted into the largest free litfest in the world and the largest literary event in the entire Asia-Pacific region.