Culture

‘Write your own name a hundred times,’ T.H. White once commented, ‘and you will be bored; seven hundred times and you will be exasperated; seven thousand times, and your brains will be reeling in your head. Then you realize that you have only written one-tenth of a new novel.’ No surprise that White should display such a familiarity with the mathematics of writing; all authors do. At least the professional ones do – they have to. When your living depends on not missing deadlines, one question looms all the time: how many words are there in a day? Actually, assuming that White meant a name comprising one forename and one surname, he was making things slightly tougher on himself than he had to.

Edwina Currie is very much an acquired taste and I am very happy that I acquired it in 1983 when we were both first elected to Parliament. Sassy, saucy, fiendishly bright, burning with drive and ambition, yet with a heart, she was head and shoulders above most of her male contemporaries and they hated her for it. People forget just how far Cameron has detoxified the Conservative party. Women, gays (only tolerated in the research department), blacks and Asians had a very steep if not impossible mountain to climb just to get on the candidates list, let alone have a chance of obtaining a winnable seat. Currie tells one tale that should shock any reader to the core: ‘Worse was the appalling story told by Geeta Sidhu, a wealthy and beautiful Indian recently selected for Blackburn...

‘Under the greenwood tree’ from As You Like It AMIENS: Under the greenwood tree Who loves to lies with me, And turn his merry note Uno the sweet bird’s throat, Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy, But winter and rough weather. Who doth ambition shun, And loves to live i’th’ sun, Seeking the food he eats, And pleased with what he gets ALL: Come hither, come hither, come hither. Here shall he see No enemy, But winter and rough weather. In As You Like It, a French duke has been usurped by his brother. He lives now in exile with his followers in the Forest of Arden (or Ardennes). There, as rumour in the new duke’s court has it, ‘they live like the old Robin Hood of England ...

“It always struck me that it was a much easier war to support the closer you got to it,” says Patrick Hennessey of the war in Afghanistan. Hennessey, who served in Helmand with the Grenadier Guards in 2007, continues: "It was so obvious that we were making the country better and that we were broadly supported by the locals, certainly in a way that we weren’t in Iraq in 2006. I know that most Guardsmen preferred Afghanistan to Iraq in that respect because they felt they were doing something tangible and positive and that it was being appreciated by the people in the country, if not necessarily the people at home.” Hennessey has just published Kandak: Fighting with the Afghans.

The question of how Europe stumbled into the horrific abyss of  the First World War, the catastrophe which The Economist once called 'the greatest tragedy in human history' is obviously of much more than purely academic interest. (Though it is chiefly academics who have been arguing about it ever since). As we approach the centenary of the conflict's outbreak, one of them, Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University, has written a magnificently detailed study of the diplomatic dance that led the continent up to and over the edge. The Sleepwalkers should be required reading for politicians and decision-makers fumblingly steering the world in our own age, an epoch perhaps even more dangerous than the era of 1914.

Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to common experience, though, is it inappropriate to share it, or just unnecessary? Unmastered, I think, will divide on that question. It will divide readers, in fact, quite generally. It presents itself as something more than a book, as a corporeal embodiment of an experience that, while common to most, is presented as peculiarly the author’s own. Katherine Angel essentially seeks to re-create in book form the sex she shared with a lover (‘The Man’). In it, she also discusses the aftermath of an abortion.

Lawrence Norfolk has always liked to centre his novels around a mixture of existing and constructed myth, and then let the action which happens centuries later be informed by or feed back into this network. His first book in twelve years, John Saturnall’s Feast, explores how the Civil War affected the career of a 17th century chef, the kitchens of great country houses and the symbolism of food. Its mythic centre is a pagan rite belonging to a pre-Christian British people, in which serving and eating food was the basis of an egalitarian community. In Charles I’s reign the one person left alive with the key to this feast is an orphan called John Saturnall, who has gone to work as a kitchen boy at the local manor.

The muggles of Tutshill, Gloucestershire, have a bone to pick with J.K. Rowling. Tutshill is where Rowling spent her unhappy teens and apparently it is the model for Pagford, the snob-ridden village in Rowling’s anticipated foray into “grown-up fiction”, The Casual Vacancy. The villagers (who I assume cannot have seen an advance copy of the book, which is in solitary confinement until its release on Thursday) are livid at the rumoured insult they are about to be paid. One resident quipped: ‘She is a fantasy writer after all. This sounds like another of her fantasies.’ Rowling’s fantasies, though, have usually contained a small measure of social realism.

A fascinating case was recently brought before the Italian courts. After six years of conjugal submission to her padrone (far better than master, give it that) a woman has filed for divorce with accusations of abuse. The slight snag is that prior to marriage she signed a contract with her lover agreeing to offer herself slavishly to his every whim, if not whip – some may be surprised to learn that physical marking and asphyxia were strictly forbidden. Tedious and predictable comparisons have been made with 50 Shades of hot air, but somewhat more interestingly, also, with Story of O (1954) by Pauline Réage (Anne Desclos). Réage’s novel is hugely erotic, but is all the more discomforting for being so.