Culture

Issue 39 of Areté starts with the words “MEMOIR ISSUE” on the front cover. It is dedicated to writing which remembers its author. Hence we get essays on Proust; Art Spiegelman’s MAUS; Nabokov’s Speak, Memory; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Salman Rushdie’s 2012 memoir Joseph Anton; and a terrific account of the monomania of bored US soldiers in Iraq, by an ex-US airborne ranger, among others. Craig Raine – Areté’s founder and editor – disguises his editorial line artfully. On p42 Candia McWilliam asks the question: ‘What have biography and fiction to give one another?’ Questions like this occur throughout Areté.

Why can’t politicians resist the temptation to comment? Hilary Mantel’s piece in the LRB is about as political as the pasta I was eating when David Cameron stopped darkening Indian doors for a moment to make what political strategists and pundits term “an intervention” on the matter. What possessed him (and Ed Miliband, who followed him into the mad breach)? The question is best answered, I think, by Peter Oborne in The Rise of Political Lying and much of his other writing. Oborne describes how political reality has changed. There was a time, at least in theory, when politics was determined by arguments over a verifiable truth; but this has been replaced by a competition of narratives. The era of ‘truth’ might be defined simply as: which ideas work.

Anne McIntosh is the Conservative MP for the Thirsk and Malton constituency, as well as being Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee. She shares her favourite books with Spectator readers this weekend. 1) Which book is on your bedside table at the moment? It's Headhunters by Jo Nesbo, and it's actually in Danish. I'm half Danish and I try to keep my language up but I have to say it does take me a while – I do read quite slowly anyway. It was written in Norwegian but translated into Danish and English. That's the one I'm reading at the minute. It's quite exciting. 2. Which book would you read to children? I would read the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, they're for children but they have a moral to them as well, and there are loads of them.

Last year I wrote an unpatriotic column for the Observer. I said that while American literary and journalistic frauds tended to be simple men, who lied and plagiarised to boast their reputations and earnings, British frauds were as a rule darker and nastier. The first piece of evidence was Johann Hari – whose exposure caused the greatest scandal my small world of “broadsheet” journalism had seen in years. Hari did not confine himself to making up quotes and facts to enhance his career. Night after night, he went on Wikipedia and defamed his many enemies under a variety of pseudonyms – I should declare an interest and state that I am proud to say that I was one of them. It wasn’t enough for Hari to con his way up the greasy pole.

Following in the footsteps of the great tradition of paleontologists like Stephen Jay Gould, and evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr, Neil Shubin, professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy at the University of Chicago, has spent a considerable part of his career discovering fossils around various parts of the world. These have changed the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution. He famously discovered tiktaalik roseae, a 375 million years old fossil fish, in Canada in 2004. This discovery provided valuable data in helping us understand how fish evolved into land animals.

Tarts. That’s what we are, really, us writers. Not just in the general sense of loving attention – also in the more specific, ‘professional’ meaning of the word. Our living depends on how good we are at attracting people’s attention and, more importantly, their money. We deploy all sorts of tricks to achieve this, above and beyond the actual content of our books. They’re the literary equivalents of fishnet stockings and bright red lipstick. It was only chatting to a friend recently that I realised just how many tricks there are. Travis Elborough and I had met for a drink, and he arrived bearing a copy of his new book, London Bridge in America.

Here are the answers to the quiz posted last week. The winner will receive a signed first edition of Lynn Shepherd’s new novel, A Treacherous Likeness, which was inspired by the Shelleys. You can read Andrew Taylor’s Spectator review of A Treacherous Likeness here, or subscribe to do so here.

Cricket glorifies some cheats. W.G. Grace often batted on after being clean bowled; such was the public demand to watch him. Douglas Jardine’s bodyline tactics revolutionised fast bowling: eventually making it acceptable to target the batsman rather than the wicket. Fielders “work” the ball. Batsmen stand their ground when convention asks them to walk. Cheating is part of cricket. But match fixing? The culprits live forever in infamy, and deservedly so. The cricketing authorities (the ICC) believed that match fixing had died ten years ago; but the News of the World’s sting on the Pakistan team in 2010 demolished those hopes. The sting suggested that the problem was deep. Rumours abounded around the globe.

Donald Anderson is a former US Air Force Colonel and current professor of English Literature at the US Air Force Academy. His new book, Gathering Noise from my Life: A Camouflaged Memoir, is a controlled crash, like all landings. It skips and judders, the wheels skidding across the tarmac, until finally the plane is at rest. One line aphorisms such as, ‘William Burroughs was for thieving and against paraphrasing altogether,’ are followed by paragraphs which, every so often, glide into anecdotes mingling observations of war with memories of a small town upbringing in Butte, Montana.

This blog post is not going to say anything original. You’ll have read it all before. Its sole purpose is to convince you that P.G. Wodehouse is the master so everyone else should give up, particularly the people who’ve tried to adapt Blandings for the telly. Blandings on TV is not all that bad. I’ve laughed at the gentler moments of farce. Some of the dialogue sparkles. The performances are good-ish. The setting has some charm. But I’m inclined to agree with everyone else who has spent brain power on it: the screen can't do Wodehouse. My father once told me that he kept copies of The Code of the Woosters and Right Ho, Jeeves in his desk at work. He referred to them, he said, whenever he suspected that his prose had grown pallid.

At 3pm this afternoon Radio 4’s Ramblings with Clare Balding will broadcast a programme about The Walking Book Club, to which Emily Rhodes belongs. ‘I love walking in London,’ said Mrs Dalloway. ‘Really it’s better than walking in the country.’ As a keen reader, writer and walker, I am always intrigued when an author writes a walk into their work of fiction. Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Bond Street at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway is one of Virginia Woolf’s most astonishing authorial feats.