Culture

Jack and Mabel move to Alaska to try to separate themselves from a tragedy — the loss of their only baby — that has frozen the core of their relationship. They intend to establish a homestead in the wilderness, but it is 1920 and they are middle-aged, friendless and from ‘back east’ — unprepared and ill-equipped for the backbreaking work and unspeakable loneliness of pioneer life. By the middle of their second winter the climate, isolation and sorrow of their situation seem to have got the better of them; at the opening of The Snow Child we find them at the end of their wits and their resources. During a singular moment’s lightheartedness  after a snowfall the desperate couple builds a snow child beside their house and dresses it in hat and scarf.

Who is Britain’s greatest ever general? The BBC and the National Army Museum put the question to the public at the end of last year. The public declared the Duke of Wellington Britain’s best, together with William Slim. Professor Saul David is not so sure. His latest book, All The King’s Men: The British soldier from the Restoration to Waterloo, sketches the beginnings of a revision of Wellington. I asked him about this rather bold move. ‘I certainly did not set out writing the rather large section [in the book] on Wellington to bash him, but the more detail I got into about his career and how he reacted to certain situations, the more convinced I thought that he has been slightly overrated by historians.

The Queen rarely intervenes in public life. It is a mark of the vehemence of the recent attacks on the Church of England that she has leapt to its defence, characterising it as the guardian of people of all faiths and none. The storm of words between secularists and establishmentarians will intensify tomorrow when the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, publishes his defence of faith, We Don’t Do God: The Marginalisation of Public Faith. It’s a strident book , especially as Carey was more ridiculed than revered as a liberal primate.

This week's Shelf Lifer, Mary Quant (pictured here in 1960s), invented both the mini-skirt and hot pants. If that weren't enough, she later claimed to have invented the duvet cover. She tells us which part of the Bible she would take into solitary confinement and which character in Little Women gets her going. Her autobiography is out tomorrow. 1) As a child what did you read under the covers? Enid Blyton – My father disapproved as it was fashionably thought to be bad English. 2) Has a book ever made you cry and if so which one?   Many books and most of all those by Amelia Ann Stiggins. 3) You are about to be put in solitary confinement for a year and allowed to take three books.  What would you choose?

Writers have to be careful of prizes — careful of thinking about them, or not thinking about them. Sitting down to write, one needs one’s head clear of all the apparatus of vanity and status anxiety and self-doubt that may clutter it the rest of the time. No one who’s any good puts words on the page to win prizes: good writers aim at something much bigger and more difficult. And yet prizes do change the literary landscape — they draw writing habits and patterns and fashions inexorably after them. It goes without saying that they are a bit of a blunt instrument: getting it right sometimes, wrong sometimes, not fine-tuned to the taste of every discriminating reader.  But they help sell books, and we all need books sold.

Gatsby’s back. A film adaptation of F Scott Fitzgerald’s enduring book will released later this year, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan. Why now? Asks Philip Hensher in today’s Telegraph, a question he easily answers: ‘It’s just the novel for us. Its world reflects on bubbles and gaudy display, and people whose magnificent social position conceals an obscure history. You don’t have to look far to find Gatsby-like figures in London today. Would a modern-day Gatsby be a property developer, selling glass-walled penthouses for tens of millions? Or would a modern-day Gatsby be a Russian oligarch, with origins lost in some Siberian village and sinister staff patrolling the outer rim of the vast Home Counties estate?

Of all the pieces celebrating the life and legacy of ‘the Inimitable’ Dickens, Toby Young has, for my money, written the most important. In the latest issue of the Spectator, Toby reveals that numerous state secondary schools have dropped Dickens from their GCSE curriculums on the grounds that ‘ordinary children’ cannot cope with the books. Private schools, he says, challenge their pupils. Certainly, the independent school I attended forced us to read Hard Times in addition to Jane Eyre, which was the set text. We were also encouraged to read North and South and Middlemarch to produce exam scripts that ‘glisten among the dross’, I recall my Labour-voting, Guardian-reading English teacher remarking.