Culture

One night a few years ago in Washington DC, Katherine Boo tripped over an ‘unabridged dictionary’, broke three ribs, punctured a lung and, as she lay on the floor unable to reach a telephone, ‘arrived at a certain clarity’ about her future. With most people — certainly those like Boo with a history of wretched health — the clarity would have taken the form of some assuasive advice: ‘Take it easy,’ ‘Don’t push yourself,’ ‘Find something less difficult to write about.’ For Boo, a Pulitzer Prize-winner who has written mainly about poverty in the US, clarity suggested the opposite.

Of the writing of books on the Second World War, and the reading public's appetite for them, seemingly, there is no end. And the past few months have seen a particularly rich crop from some of our finest and most senior historians of the conflict; their books representing the considered summation of their thoughts on the worst disaster humankind has yet to experience.   Of the quartet under review, David Edgerton's Britain's War Machine offers the boldest revisionist argument that seeks to overturn some of our most treasured assumptions about Britain's role in the war.

With Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo: State of England — the horrific account of a hard-living career criminal turned celebrity lottery winner — climbing the bestseller charts,  Li and his creator shouldn't be confused. At least, that is according to Amis, who recently told the Spectator that he was never a rebel. Richard Bradford, author of last year’s universally panned Martin Amis: The Biography had planned on shining a light on Amis’ greener youth. At one point the vexed manuscript apparently included a fond Amis recollection of smoking joints in Picasso's on the King's Road, something that would have resulted in arrest in about ten minutes.

The most obvious — but far from the only — author to read when in Madrid must be Ernest Hemingway. For a man so fond of the laconic line, his rambling, enduring presence in the city is at once ironic and misplaced. It’s not only the guidebooks which are directing me to his erstwhile favourite watering-hole in the north, south, east or west of the city; it’s as if he left a tangible reminder of his presence — an extra shiny spot or cigarette burn burnished into the leather of an armchair — in each of the now rather shabby-chic establishments.

Although it's over seventy years since his death, the attitude quoted under the OED entry for 'Joycean' from Eric Partridge's World of Words still persists: 'Joyceans are artificial, but, except at the cost of a highly gymnastic cerebration, unintelligible'. This 'Bloomsday', an annual celebration on the day the novel is set, Radio 4 decided their listeners needed a gentle mental workout. First, a warm-up with Thursday's edition of In Our Time as Melvyn Bragg was on hand to help us decipher the playful complexity of an author who readily admitted: 'I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

Do great novelists make great essayists? Not in the case of Jonathan Franzen, at least according to Phillip Lopate, who reviewed Franzen’s new essay collection Farther Away for the New York Times. Lopate is a fan of Franzen’s but feels his non-fiction pieces – though entertaining and interesting – are ‘not nearly as strong as his novels’. He sets out some reasons why: ‘While his prose is always cogent, he is not that consistently stylish a sentence writer. Essays put a different kind of pressure on the sentence, calling for more aphoristic compression and wit. His novels work best through patient accumulation of social detail and character development. By contrast, the I-character in his essays is not as strongly developed, nor as vivid.

E-books are going to win. Anyone who’s seen a bus or a train carriage or a café lately knows that: Kindles everywhere, as though they’re breeding. And that’s as it should be. Stand in the way of convenient technology which people want, and you’re in the same position as every refusenik from the Luddites to the newspaper unions of the 1980s. But before the printed book takes its final bow, and retreats to its status as endearing novelty, let’s take a look at the sort of experience we’re going to miss. A friend recently came across a single volume from an 18th century Spectator series, and knowing of my scribblings for said organ and its website, gave me the book as a present.

It is perhaps fitting — given his lack of fame and success — that many of you will have never heard of Pat Hobby. Hobby was a character who featured in a number of F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories towards the end of the author’s life, when he was working in Hollywood. Hobby is a forty-nine year old scriptwriter whose best days are long behind him. Rather than reaching out for a green light at the end of a dock in Long Island, Pat is forever scrabbling around for his next ten dollars in order to buy another drink or pay off his bookie. Regardless of whether he employs honest means to attain his ends, Pat’s adventures invariably end in failure.

‘Now most lobbyists spend their days clicking through PowerPoint slides about obscure policies while bored junior congressional staff check their BlackBerries under the table. Those guys are the rabble. Comparing them to the folks at the Davies Group is like comparing Zales to Tiffany and Cartier. Davies is among a handful of strategic consulting firms that do very little formal lobbying. These outfits are run by Washington heavies—ex–House Speakers, ex–secretaries of state, ex–national security advisers—and they exert a far more powerful and lucrative influence through the Beltway’s back channels. They’re not registered as lobbyists. They don’t do volume. They don’t advertise. They have relationships. They’re discreet.