Culture

Parish churches are the sentinels of England’s past. They soar over every town and village, pinning it to the nation’s soil. The nave may be empty, the graveyard unkempt and the roll-call of the faithful soon to cede primacy to the mosque. But the Church of England guards our rituals and speaks for our communities. The English still want their local spokesmen to be vicars not mayors. Roger Scruton should have been a bishop. He would have gone to the top, and spared Anglicans their present agony over whom to send to Canterbury. Archbishop Scruton would have gathered up the church’s shattered canticles, creeds and conflicts and marched them to death or glory with learning and charm. This book is an elegant manifesto. It should have been a job application.

There are quite a few candidates competing for the title of the first novel in English literature. You can make a strong case for Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, or Gulliver’s Travels of 1726, or even – at a push – argue for Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, issued over a hundred years before, but one of the super-heavyweight contenders will always be Samuel Richardson’s 1740 novel-in-letters, Pamela. When it first appeared Pamela was as much of a sensation as the X Factor and Fifty Shades rolled into one, a genuine ‘multi-media event’ more than two hundred years before that phrase was even coined.

On starting a new job at Westminster in the early 2000s, and despondent about my party’s lot, I began to write a political novel. Aspiring writers are told to write about the world around them, and, as an observer on the ‘inside’, there was no shortage of material. Gloom and frustration hung heavily in those days. The standard question was: why the hell aren’t we in government and whose fault is it? The Duncan Smith leadership was evidently doomed from the moment of its conception, but the ‘quiet man’ stumbled on to his inevitable demise. If the party wasn’t going to find a broadly appealing leader, I’d better write one instead.

‘To the Grave’ Unclasp thy womb, thou mortuary shrine, And take the worst part of the best we had. Thou hast no harbourage for things divine, That thou had'st any part was yet too bad. Graves, for the grave, are fit, unfit for thee Was our sweet branch of youthful royalty. Thou must restore each atom back again When that day comes that stands beyond all night. His fame (meanwhile) shall here on earth remain, Lo thus we have divided our delight: Heaven keeps his spirit stalled amongst the just, We keep his memory, and thou his dust. Prince Henry was the eldest son of James I and VI (that’s first of England, sixth of Scotland). In 1612 he died at the age of eighteen. An extraordinary period of spontaneous popular mourning followed.

Ciaran Carson was born in Belfast in 1948, and published his first book of poetry, The New Estate, in 1976. Fans of Carson had to wait eleven years for his second book, The Irish for No (1987), which earned him the Alice Hunt Barlett Award. Belfast Confetti (1990) won The Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry. In 1993 Carson won the first ever T.S. Eliot Prize for poetry, for his collection, First Language; while his 2003 collection, Breaking News, won the Forward Poetry Prize. That same year, Carson was appointed Professor of Poetry, and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, at Queen’s University in Belfast; a position he has held since. Carson has also proved himself to be an accomplished translator.

Judy Finnigan tells us which Dane she'd take on holiday, which book she found in her mother's bedside drawer and which book had better be on Richard Madeley's reading list. Eloise by Judy Finnigan is published by Sphere. She tweets @judyfinnigan. 1). What are you reading at the moment? I’m currently re-reading American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld. 2). As a child, what did you read under the covers? Lady Chatterley’s Lover, by D.H. Lawrence. I found it in my mother’s bedside drawer. 3). Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one? The Time Traveller’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger. Do not judge this wonderful novel by the awful film. 4). You are about to be put into solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books. What would you choose?

I was on a date once in Atlanta, Georgia. We decided on the theatre and there was only one show playing, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. After a night time drive under the arms of blue mossed oaks we made it to Emory University and took our seats and the curtain rose on a Victorian living room. Cautiously, with a canine playfulness, from out behind a sofa, tromped a dinosaur. I kept thinking of this moment as I read Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala.  Originally published in 1926 before he became a renowned playwright, Wilder attempted the same tricks here. He interjects Keats, Virgil, and even incarnate Mercury, into a contemporary 1920s narrative, in order to argue that the human condition has never improved, that culture is only a jacket that fits over a skeleton.

Mike McCormack published his first book of short stories Getting it in the Head in 1996. The debut earned him the Rooney Prize for Literature, and was chosen as a New York Times notable book of the year in 1998. McCormack has published two novels: Crowe’s Requiem, and Notes From a Coma, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award in 2006. Forensic Songs, his latest collection of short stories, fuses traditional social realism with elements of science fiction, and the detective genre. While some stories here follow the path of straightforward naturalism; analyzing the difficult relationships within families; or the alienation of emigration, others probe issues that move into the world of futuristic surrealism.

‘The line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being… This line is not static within us; it sways to and fro over the years. Even in a heart imbued with evil, it allows a small bridgehead of good to remain. And it permits a small niche of evil to survive even in the kindest of hearts.’ These words were written by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, seeking to explain why The Gulag Archipelago was necessarily ambiguous. But they also fit elements of the Savile scandal, which is being prejudged in increasingly black and white terms. Charles Moore’s observation that this grim affair is a ‘dreadful warning’ about the perils of fame is compelling: ‘when you are up, no criticism, when you are down (and dead), no mercy.