Culture

Downing Street and the press are rarely a productive coupling, though it seems the PM’s spin team have, for once, inadvertently spawned something positive. Introducing his new book about journalistic cliché to the world at a star-studded occasion’ in ‘London's glamorous West End’ this week, Bloomberg hack Rob Hutton told how No.10 had triggered him to write Romps, Tots and Boffins: ‘This book wouldn't have happened at all, but for No 10's inability to find a plane with room for journalists whenever the PM goes to controversial places.

One of Philip Hensher's many qualities as a critic is that he doesn't take prisoners. So his entertaining and judicious guide to the Man Booker longlist ended like this: 'The shortlist should comprise McCann, Tóibín, Mendelson, Crace, House and Catton. House’s novel is the one you ought to read, and Mendelson’s the one that everyone will read and love. The prize will go to Crace.' We now know whether the judges have followed his advice. Answer: they went halfway with him. They have Jim Crace's Harvest – so his tip for the winner is still on – Colm Tóibín's The Testament of Mary and Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries.

The Lowland is the magnificent new novel by Jhumpa Lahiri, which has been longlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. It tells the story of two brothers, Subhash and Udayan, who come of age in Calcutta in the late 1960s. ‘Subhash was thirteen, older by fifteen months. But he had no sense of himself without Udayan. From his earliest memories, at every point, his brother was there,’ writes Lahiri. This was the beginning of a troubled period in West Bengal, as a radical communist movement known as the Naxalite cause swept through the region, inciting idealistic young men, in particular, to violence and acts of terror.

If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to read Jenny McCartney’s piece in this week’s issue of the magazine. Together with Christopher Fletcher’s personal appreciation of Seamus Heaney published here earlier this week, it is among the most original and thoughtful takes on the late Nobel Laureate’s life and work. It’s typical of Jenny’s ability to tease and test details, to coax them to a wider context. And, my, is she readable. The best place to start is at the beginning: ‘The one and only time I met Seamus Heaney, in 2007, he was making tea in the kitchen of his Dublin home when he asked — more modestly regretful than coy — ‘Did you have to do the poems at school?

The Guardian notes that Ladbrokes and William Hill share Philip Hensher’s hunch for the Booker shortlist, which is to be unveiled next week. ‘Hunch’ isn’t the right word. Hensher wrote in these pages a fortnight ago: ‘The shortlist should comprise McCann, Tóibín, Mendelson, Crace, House and Catton. House’s novel is the one you ought to read, and Mendelson’s the one that everyone will read and love. The prize will go to Crace.’ For the record then, Hensher’s shortlist would be: TransAtlantic by Colum McCann, The Testament of Mary by Colm Tóibín, Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson, Harvest by Jim Crace, The Kills by Richard House and The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton, with the prize going to Crace.

It may be that only geological erosion, expected to occur sometime over the next ten million years, will finally remove Gibraltar as a source of friction between Britain and Spain. In the meantime, with a poll showing that nearly two thirds of Spaniards support their government’s current tough line on the territory, David Cameron has again reassured the Rock’s chief minister Fabian Picardo that Britain will always stand up for Gibraltar and safeguard the interests of its people. But while the tension is real and enduring, there is no suggestion on either side that the situation might be resolved by force. Seventy-three years ago, in the autumn of 1940, the mood was very different. The threat to British sovereignty was real and imminent.

‘So.’ So begins Seamus Heaney’s translation of ‘Beowulf’. I know it didn’t come easy to him. The morning after he had been awarded the Whitbread Prize for the work I found myself having breakfast at the Savoy with him and his wife Marie. I’d asked some time before whether I could borrow some of the manuscript pages for a literary exhibition at the British Library. I was a curator there at that time and for a special limited edition of his book had helped get a facsimile image from the original thousand year old manuscript, next to which I now wanted to show his drafts. He tossed an envelope across the table and it landed near me, somewhere between the butter and the jam. ‘What’ s that, Seamus?’ asked Marie.

The unlikely heroine of Mave Fellowes’s Chaplin & Company (Cape, £16.99) is a highly-strung, posh-speaking, buttoned-up 18-year-old with the unhelpful name Odeline Milk. Utterly friendless, she dislikes both humans and animals, but she has one huge, far-reaching private passion. She wants to be a mime artist — like the great Marcel Marceau. To launch her career, she has sold her mother’s house in Sussex and bought a scruffy old canal boat called Chaplin & Company, currently moored in Little Venice. In the flashbacks that follow, we learn about Odeline’s miserable childhood — albeit lit up by a few eureka moments — along with the history of her new floating home and the past lives of her immediate neighbours on the canal.