Culture

Just his luck. Adrian Mole is 30 years old — or 43 and ¾s to be precise. The appreciation of Sue Townsend’s most famous creation has grown into uncritical hagiography. The Mole series is not effortlessly and consistently brilliant as the Blandings or Jeeves and Wooster novels, or Tom Sharpe’s Wilt farces. The later Mole books are too soft and too ‘correct’ for my taste. The Cappuccino Years, for instance, was addled with the complacency that reigned supreme before the recent financial disasters and sovereign debt crises. It was smug rather than funny, building the status quo rather than testing it. However, the earliest Mole diaries are up there with Diary of a Nobody, Scoop and Right Ho Jeeves in the Hall of Fame.

The Orange Prize longlist has just been announced, followed by the perennial hoo-ha over its right to exist. Is it sexist to have a prize just for women? Is sexism the reason why we need a prize just for women? Does anyone outside the comment boards on the Guardian website actually care? All it is, really, is a wheeze to sell more books, something it manages pretty well. One problem with the Orange Prize is that the quality is often not that great. The shortlist and the winner sometimes seem like they’ve been chosen by a group of book publicists thinking, “Ooh, the media’s going to love this author’s interesting backstory!” or “Wouldn’t this novel be fab for bookclubs?!

More farm life than park life, the only cheese Alex James now produces is in his dairy. He lets us in on which books he's reading in his country house, what he'd get girls & boys to read for school and why he thinks literature is what a good camembert could never be: past its sell-by date. His latest book All Cheeses Great and Small: A Life Less Blurry is out now. Mark Mason has reviewed it for the current issue of the Spectator.   1) What are you reading at the moment? Treasure Island. I haven't stopped reading it for five years. It's a masterpiece.   2) As a child, what did you read under the covers?

Ask anyone and they will have a pretty good idea what sort of a bloke Sherlock Holmes is. He’s clever — sometimes too clever — erudite, shrewd, eccentric, a bit of a babe magnet but above all a winner.  He always comes out on top even with the ghastly and dastardly Moriarty. Holmes is a hero.  But what about Watson? Sometimes he’s a slouch and other times he’s a swashbuckler, it depends on who has written the story or who is playing him. In any event we are never quite certain about him.   But the facts upon which he is modelled are fascinating. First, Conan Doyle was a doctor in general practice and we know that he toyed with going into the army.

There's one problem with book reviewing these days. No, it's nothing to do with an industry that's cosier than Joseph Fritzl's cellar or columns that are dropping inches faster than Vanessa Feltz's waist (post gastric band). It's the books themselves. Novels that have the potential to be hugely irritating usually come equipped with two safety guards that make them impervious to attack. Debuts are particularly good examples. Any young modern novelist worth his salt sprinkles his work with a good pinch of irony. And then whacks on a glossy layer of self-reflexivity. These techniques ensure that one's too busy thinking about the production of the text (by the narrator, author, editor and reader) to pay any attention to the text itself.

In April 1982, as the Falklands War got underway, HMS Antrim steamed south through the Atlantic. On board was 28-year-old Lieutenant, Chris Parry. Parry kept a diary for ten weeks which recounted in vivid detail the action at sea and in the air, as well as daily life on board ship. 30 years later Down South: A Falklands War Diary has been published. Parry spoke to the Spectator about why the sinking of the Belgrano boat was justified, how talking about war prevents suicide, and the role the British press played in the conflict. When and why did you start keeping a diary? I began my diary on 3 April 1982, the day after the Argentinians invaded the Falklands because I thought that we might be about to embark on an unusual deployment.

New York —  Call me an old curmudgeon, but it seems to me that the only way the description World Book Day would make any sense would be if, in some way, the world was brought together by a book — preferably on the same day.   But for that to happen, J.K. Rowling would have to produce an unexpected eighth volume in the Harry Potter series — Harry Potter and the Tyranny of Expectation, perhaps — when in fact, from what one hears, she plans to enter the murky world of Ian Rankin and Edinburgh noir.   So we shouldn’t get our hopes up.

Wilbur Smith is this week's Shelf Lifer. He tells us which books make him cry, describes the party he wishes he could have attended and lets us in on a 'highly rewarding but rather sticky experience.' Apparently, his agent Charles Pick once told him "Write for yourself, and write about what you know best." He seems to have taken this piece of advice to heart. Those in Peril by Wilbur Smith is out now. Visit his Facebook to find out more.  1) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The first book I ever read under the covers at boarding school was Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor. It was a highly rewarding but rather sticky experience. 2) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?

A ‘gigantic confidence trick’ — that is how Jeremy Paxman describes the British Empire. The first episode of the TV series which accompanies his book, Empire: What ruling the World Did to the British, aired last night. Paxman’s thesis can be reduced into a string of his trademark soundbites. British imperialism was a ‘protection racket’, based on the conceit that a handful of well-equipped soldiers and well-educated officials could provide stable government for the feckless potentates of India, Africa and the Middle East. Any challenge to British interests was ‘met with savage retaliation’, which invariably resulted in expansion.