Culture

Regularly voted one of the greatest American novels of the last century, Theodore Dreiser’s moralising epic An American Tragedy (1925) hasn’t aged well. Adapted for the cinema as A Place in the Sun, however, it paired Montgomery Clift with the 17-year-old Elizabeth Taylor and gave us a film that still grips more than 60 years later. Director George Stevens disparaged what he called Technicolor’s ‘Oh, what a beautiful morning’ quality, and monochrome is indeed more suited to the ethical grey area explored by the film: whether a man who plans a murder but can’t go through with it is as guilty as a killer.

Anyone who watched last night's Channel 4 Documentary Richard III: The King Under the Car Park will need no reminding that members of the Richard III Society tend to be delusional fantasists rather than serious historians. Although we should doubtless be grateful to the Society for funding the dig that discovered the monarch's bones, that very fact tends to slant the coverage of Richard's resurrection. There has been much talk about 're-writing history' and countering 'Tudor propaganda'; but the inconvenient truth (for Ricardians) is that the late king's spine was indeed twisted by scoliosis and one of his shoulders was noticeably higher than the other. Those particular pieces of Tudor and Shakespearian “spin” were no more than the plain truth.

The confirmation that bones found beneath a Leicester car park are ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ those of Richard III has launched a deluge of familiar puns. ‘A hearse! A hearse! My kingdom for a hearse!’ say numerous wags on Twitter. I wonder if Richard III would be remembered so widely today were it not for Shakespeare. The character of the play, who speaks some of the most famous lines in English, is descended from the portrait drawn by Sir Thomas More in an uncompleted history written at various points throughout the 1510s. Many historians argue that More wrote the book to please the Tudors.

John Ashbery is recognized as one of the most eminent American poets of the twentieth-century. He also been called America’s greatest living poet today. Ashbery published his first book of poems Some Trees in 1956; it earned him the Yale Younger Poets Prize: a competition that was judged by W.H. Auden at the time. He has picked up many literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. At 85, he shows no signs of putting down his pen. He has recently published a collection of poems entitled Quick Question. Although the majority of critics have recognized his talent, many have also pointed to the fact that his poems don’t have — in the traditional sense — a specific subject matter.

In her Times column on Monday (£), Libby Purves valiantly attempted to fit together two things that were obviously on her mind. Discussing Pride and Prejudice, which is 200 years old this week, in relation to the modern permutations of marriage was sure to be a delicate operation. Purves argued that the book's appeal lies in both its wit and the intellectual and emotional foreplay between Elizabeth and Darcy. What might seem ‘subversive’ for modern sensibilities, Purves suggests, is the fluttering of Elizabeth's heart when she sees the size of Darcy's pile. Nowadays, she argues, marriage is about ‘love’, of course. It doesn't matter about class, wealth or gender. That seems naive.

Hilary Mantel has won the Costa Book Award of the Year for Bring up the Bodies. It saw off contenders: Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner (the children’s book winner), The Innocents by Francesca Segal (the first novel award), The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie (the poetry prize) and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot (winner of the best biography award, and the first graphic work to win a Costa prize). Mantel collected the prize fund of £30,000. Mantel’s win means that she has also secured a ‘literary treble’: Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award and Costa Book of the Year. This achievement is worthy of this extraordinary book.

This post by M.E. Synon is the first in a series about Stephen Spielberg's Lincoln. A counter-argument will be published tomorrow, followed by a comparison of screen and literary adaptations of the last months of Abraham Lincoln's life. Last week in Dublin there was the European premiere of Spielberg’s film on Lincoln. Why Dublin? Because the star Daniel Day-Lewis lives in Ireland and he wanted the premiere as a fundraiser for an Irish charity.

David Mitchell slaps a big hand on his head. ‘I look back at that kid and think, what were you thinking! How dare you, idiot!’ He is talking about his recklessness as a young writer. ‘Yeah I’ll stop it halfway, five times, and start it again. I’ll pretend I’m a Chinese woman living up a mountain.’ He compares it to being a teenager ‘leaping off a 12-foot wall’ without fear. As writers get older, he says, the recklessness subsides, and ‘it needs to be replaced by technique. If you can do that, you’re still in business.’ One of his most madly structured books, Cloud Atlas, has just been made into a film. That’s why we are meeting.