Culture

I have a confession. I saw a report on the Suzanne Moore row, and fled immediately for the safety of the sports pages. A lot of self-important people making a lot of noise, I thought to myself, as a glib heterosexual, while gawping at the latest act in the life and times of Mario Balotelli. But, as time passed, the fury of the Moore row made me revisit Culture of Complaint, the late Robert Hughes’ analysis of the culture wars. It’s sometimes said that we Brits don’t do culture wars; that we are much too sensible to be provoked into believing that trivialities are serious. This view appears to be a hangover from the over-egged claims Victorians made about ‘English exceptionalism’.

Sharon Olds won the TS Eliot Prize last night for Stag’s Leap, which is an account of her divorce from her husband of thirty-two years, who left her for another woman. Chairman of the judging panel, the poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, said: ‘This was the book of her career. There is a grace and chivalry in her grief that marks her out as being a world-class poet. I always say that poetry is the music of being human, and in this book she is really singing. Her journey from grief to healing is so beautifully executed.’ Stag’s Leap is written in Olds’ unique style, which mixes blunt honesty and touching intimacy. Olds takes the reader on a journey of loss and isolation as she comes to terms with her husband's leap for freedom.

Poor Kate Middleton. In the royal tradition of artistic and literary representation, what defines her at this moment in time? The creepy feature on her wardrobe statistics in February’s Vogue? Or Paul Emsley’s even creepier official portrait revealed last week? Emsley’s Vaseline lens ‘Gaussian girl’ take on the future consort would have been appropriate had she the complexion of Doris Day, whose preference for the blurred lens was renowned. The fact we all know that Kate’s skin is like butter, her eyes sparkly, and demeanour jollier than her hockey stick makes her first official portrait instantly bewildering. Just imagine, though, if we didn’t know any of those things.

The Spectator is proud to announce it has a new Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize winner — Tara Isabella Burton. Tara's dazzling travel essay about the town of Tbilisi greatly impressed the judges, which this year included Colin Thubron and Joanna Kavenna. Tara's piece, which you can read here, was published in our Christmas issue. We want to blare her trumpet a bit more, and also to announce that the other five essays that made our shortlist will appear online in the coming days. These will be pieces by our runner-up Steven McGregor, who wrote poignantly about visiting the House of Lords, as well as by Dina Segal, William Nicoll, Cheryl Follon and Marianne Brown.

Whenever I give lectures on my book on censorship – Whaddya mean you haven't read it? Buy it here at a recession-beating price – I discuss the great issues of the wealthy to silence critics, the conflict between religion and freedom of thought and the determination of dictators to persecute dissenters. These themes have animated great philosophers. None more so, I continue, than Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, who managed to get them all into one cartoon. In a 2005, they broadcast an episode entitled Trapped in the Closet. The little boy Stan goes to one of the Scientologists' personality testing centres.

Yoram Kaniuk was born in Tel Aviv in 1930. After his experience in Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, Kaniuk moved to New York where he became a painter in Greenwich Village. Ten years later he returned to Tel Aviv, where he has lived ever since, working as a novelist, painter, and journalist. He has published various fiction, non-fiction, and children’s books over the course of his distinguished career. In 1948 — for which he was awarded the The Sapir Prize in 2010 — Kaniuk recalls fighting as a teenage soldier in Israel’s War of Independence. Told in the first person the book looks at how memory is a selective process; one that favours myth making and narrative, rather than recalling actual events.

Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip? In a far bleaker arena, this is a question that plagues Ferdinand von Schirach, the criminal defence lawyer whose most recent novel, The Collini Case, I reviewed here last year. Von Schirach’s earlier books, Crime and Guilt – both bestsellers in Germany - are compilations of stories derived from real life offences. Von Schirach has been involved in literally hundreds of criminal cases. In none of those he sets out in Crime was the guilty party ever convicted before a court of law.

I'm conducting an experiment: Life of Pi concerns a basic metaphor about faith, how is that metaphor rendered in print and on screen? I’ve re-read the book. I’ve deliberately (at this stage) not watched Ang Lee’s film; rather, I’ve found a reviewer of the film (Jonathan Kim of the Huffington Post) who has not read the book, and then I've compared notes. Jonathan Kim has derided what he saw, at least from the perspective of the metaphor: 'Life of Pi is more about the nuts and bolts of a teenager surviving at sea and bonding with a tiger than a spiritual quest that asks hard questions about the wisdom, will, and existence of God and why he seems to enjoy inflicting so much suffering and death on unoffending humans.

Fancy a walk into London's past? How about a stroll down Fleet Street in 1895? Or Oxford Street in 1899? It can be done. I can't promise pictures, but I can offer more detail on the residents of each building than Google would risk publishing today. The secret: from the mid-1830s, a man named Frederic Kelly employed agents to call at every address in London and to record the people or businesses within. Kelly was a postal official, and his agents, at least to begin with, were postmen. There was some scandal about that. Because this wasn't an official census, conducted every ten years and then locked away for a century; this was a commercial operation, conducted annually and sold in a big fat book, the Post Office London Directory.

It was a placid start. A tubby kid with peroxide blond hair approached the crease in 6 easy steps. He skipped into the air and pulled his arms backwards to build forward momentum. His left leg hit the ground and he began to rotate his shoulders from right to left. This motion brought his right arm up through the air in a wide arc. He had to hold his left arm out in front of him for balance as the shoulder-turn accelerated. His hips began to follow in the direction of his shoulders, bringing his right flank around to the left. His right arm extended above his head and neared the top of its ascent. At that moment, Shane Warne snapped his right wrist anti-clockwise and released what would become known as the ‘Ball of the Century’.

Which words in current use would you ban? Lake Superior State University answers this question each year, with its famous ‘List of Words to be Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness’. Words are recommended by members of the English speaking world, and then selected by the university. Top of the list is ‘fiscal cliff’: the catchall phrase for the various political (and cultural) difficulties that have arisen from America’s fiscal and economic crises. Opinion is split on which of ‘fiscal’ or ‘cliff’ is the greater offence. Other irate correspondents object to the vague metaphor: is America trying to scale the cliff or trying not to fall off it?