Culture

Spectator literary competition No. 2832 This week’s assignment is a nod to Robert Burns and his magnificent ‘Address to the Haggis’, which begins: Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, Great chieftain o' the pudding-race! Aboon them a' yet tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy o’a grace As lang’s my arm. Your task is to compose an address to an item of food of your choice. It is up to you whether or not you write in the style of Burns but poems should be maximum 16 lines and entries emailed to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 22 January. The recent challenge to imagine what Philip Larkin might have made of the news that Hull has been anointed 2017’s City of Culture was a popular one.

When John Bellany died in August last year, an odyssey that had alternately beguiled and infuriated the art world came to an end. Famously, Bellany had nearly died from liver failure in 1988 after years of hard drinking, but an organ transplant saved his life and gave him another 25 years of painting. Although his health was latterly precarious (he had a near-fatal heart attack in 2005) he was determined to continue working. His output was prodigious, but inevitably tended to be uneven. As both the artist and his sympathetic biographer, John McEwen, admitted, Bellany’s post-1970 work requires strict editing. (Bellany confessed that he had to paint a dozen pictures to get one beauty. Unfortunately, too many of the also-rans have found their way onto the art market.

The Albek Duo are two astonishingly beautiful and talented Venetian musicians, Fiona and Ambra, who are identical twins. Hearing the sisters perform inspired Christopher Ondaatje to create this book. He tells a story — ‘Love Duet’ — in which he imagines what would happen if the twins both fell in love with the same man. They agree that one should marry, and they should carry on as before. For the sisters, abandoning their music or each other is unthinkable. This is an anthology of stories on the theme of music and how it can govern our lives and express our emotions. You don’t need to be a concert-goer to enjoy this book — all the pieces assembled here are accessible and absorbing.

It’s rare to read a book about politics and be actually excited to get back to it, like you’re on holiday and lost in a novel; but that’s what I felt with How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters, Daniel Hannan’s account of the development of English law and politics. But then again, I am quite weird. The book begins with Hannan’s native Peru, and his father’s farm being threatened by a mob during one of that country’s various periods of political instability. Although a Hispanophile (and Francophone), Hannan goes on to explain why those of us in Britain, the United States and the other Anglosphere nations should be so grateful to live with the English system of law.

Spectator literary competition No. 2830  This week you are invited to choose, from different authors, two characters who have the same job or position (e.g., Shakespeare’s Quince and Lewis Carroll’s Carpenter, Mr Collins and Mr Slope, Holmes and Philip Marlowe) and give an excerpt of not more than 150 words from their conversation on meeting. Entries should be submitted by email to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 8 January. The recent challenge to come up with a Christmas list, in verse, in the style of the poet of your choice was another popular one and it was tough to whittle the entry down to just six.