Culture

The Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for travel writing was first awarded in 1987, and its first-ever winner was Hilary Mantel, who has since won the 2009 Booker Prize for Wolf Hall. Below is Hilary's prize-winning piece on Saudi Arabia; the judges 'particularly admired her ability to convey not only the discovery of a culture new to her but also the distaste which the discovery aroused', said then-editor of The Spectator Charles Moore. To learn more about the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, and how you can enter, click here. To read Hilary Mantel's recent blog on what winning the prize meant to her, click here.

The inclusion of Will Self on the Booker long list was like a flashing neon sign pointing towards 'Serious Literature' and away from last year's much criticised populism. In a recent interview in the Observer, the columnist, cultural pundit, professor of contemporary thought at Brunel University and novelist asserted 'I don't write for readers.

Over at the books blog, Tory MP Philip Davies has answered our Bookbencher questionnaire. Davies is the present holder of the Readers’ Representative at the Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards. He believes that 1984 is the book that best describes now; and he would rescue the three volumes of Margaret Thatcher’s autobiography from the burning British Library. Davies is known by some as the ‘darling of the right’, but after this he should be nicknamed The Gruffalo.

Adrian Heath (1920—92), like so many artists, was a mass of contradictions. Jane Rye begins her excellent study of him by quoting Elizabeth Bishop: ‘A life’s work is summed up as the dialectic of captivity and freedom, of fixed form and poetic extravagance, of social norms and personal deviance.’ Heath thought of his painting as an attempt to reconcile the intellectual and the sensual, a meeting point of classical and romantic. Roger Hilton complained that Heath couldn’t decide whether he wanted to be a painter or an accountant. Certainly, Heath did not conform to the public’s cherished image of the artist as bohemian.

When I won the first Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize, it was gratifying for me on every level. It helped me find a market for my work in the national press, and gave me the confidence to regard myself as a full-time writer. - Hilary Mantel. The Shiva Naipaul prize is awarded to the writer best able to describe a visit to a foreign place or people. The award will not be for travel writing in the conventional sense, but for the most acute and profound observation of a culture alien to the writer. Such a culture might be found as easily within the writer’s native country as outside it. The winner will receive a cash prize of £3,000. The winning entry will be published in The Spectator.

When you begin in subediting - the odd little craft of preparing other people's journalism for publication - certain things, or pairs of things, are drummed into you. St James' Park is where Newcastle United play; St James's Park is where the band of the Grenadier Guards play. Lloyds is the bank; Lloyd's is the insurance market. Pontin's has an apostrophe; Butlins doesn't. Unfortunately for subeditors, times change. St James' Park is now the Sports Direct Arena, although a similar deal has yet to be done for St James's Park. Lloyds has acquired TSB and been acquired, in turn, by the government. Pontins has emerged from financial difficulties, but it has done so minus an apostrophe. And Butlins? Butlins is now a difficult case.

Book lovers are always pleased when water-cooler conversation turns to the latest phenomenon in which a novel or author has had the kind of popular success that extends far beyond the usual book reading public. The general tenor of such discussions runs along the dyspeptic lines of: ‘Why aren’t people reading better books?’ I have heard the following: 'I find it really depressing when I see an adult reading a JK Rowling novel on the tube’, and ‘Steig Larsson may keep you turning the pages, but what a shame he died before his books could be properly edited.’ And as for Dan Brown and E L James, they have almost become shorthand (certainly among middle-class readers) for bad writing that sells in massive numbers. But do such dismissals tell the whole story?

Only America, a friend of mine once insisted, could produce the New Criterion. This friend happened to be American, but his point stands nonetheless. America alone is sufficiently large, wealthy and self-confident to sustain a conservative arts journal of such consistent quality. The New Criterion is 30 years old this year. The anniversary has given its editors cause for consideration as well as celebration. They have commissioned a series of essays on the questions prompted by the unnerving nature of the future.

The House of Lords has yet again survived reform. ‘We have been discussing this issue for 100 years and it really is time to make progress,’ the Prime Minister said last month in a pleading, exculpatory tone. What then is the trend in popular culture? Writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1949, Anthony Powell observed an, ‘ever-widening gap between the popular concept of a peer and the existing reality.’ He found greatest fault with nineteenth century novels and plays, ‘where a lord, silly or sinister, handsome or grotesque, is rarely allowed to strike a balance between extremes of conduct.’  Powell’s nineteenth century examples would certainly have included Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, staged at the Savoy Theatre in 1882.