Culture

This week marks Lawrence Durrell’s centenary. Durrell was once the great white hope of British fiction, but the cult has lapsed since his sixties heyday. Richard Davenport-Hines recently reappraised the The Alexandria Quartet, Durrell’s most famous work. He wrote, ‘It is hard now to recapture the impact half a century ago of these novels’ heat, luxuriance and profanity.’ 50 years of sex and social liberalism in the West has obviously tamed Durrell’s ‘profanity’. And the conservative backlash in the Middle East has made his once exotic tale seem slightly fanciful.

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.

John Steinbeck was born 110 years ago today. To mark the occasion, here, courtesy of the always intriguing Letters of Note, is a letter Steinbeck wrote to his son Thom, then a teenager. It speaks for itself. New York November 10, 1958 Dear Thom: We had your letter this morning. I will answer it from my point of view and of course Elaine will from hers. First—if you are in love—that’s a good thing—that’s about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Second—There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind.

Editorial conferences are fraught affairs. There is a rush of facts, opinions and suggestions. It’s a brave man who trusts his memory to retain all the information. ‘S’, a young Russian journalist who lived between the wars, was one such brave man. He could recall perfectly each name, number and hint that his editor had mentioned. This came naturally to him, but at a cost. S had to try to forget every sight and sound that he encountered in everyday life. He was a savant. S’s gift for memory was phenomenal, but it is not unobtainable. A few years ago, an American journalist called Joshua Foer wrote a book ostensibly about how to improve one’s memory by using self-taught mnemonic tricks.

Not so long ago narrative history was on the way out. Academic historians, ever more specialised, looked set for a solipsistic future writing only for colleagues ploughing the same narrow field. Yet the commercial and critical success of the likes of Antony Beevor, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Amanda Foreman (none of whom is a member of the academy), has demonstrated the continuing desire among the public for serious but accessible history.

More bad news for people who like their reading matter to come with a spine: January sales for printed books were down 16 per cent on last year's. There are lots of reasons for this — ebooks, better telly, a global pandemic of attention deficit disorder — but what’s often overlooked is modern publishing's tendency to value quantity over quality.   Over 150,000 books were published in the UK last year, an increase of nearly 50 per cent on a decade ago. Not all of this is down to the growth in self-publishing. The book industry appears to have taken trendy longtail theory — increase profits by selling less of more — and swallowed it the wrong way.

The Leveson inquiry was convened to ‘examine the culture, practices and ethics of the media’. Most of the inquiry’s time has been devoted to newspapers, particularly tabloid newspapers. To date, no publishers have been called to give evidence, although they may yet be. I very much hope that they are, because a new book published by Faber, Aftermath by Rachel Cusk, raises questions about publishers’ ethics and privacy law. Aftermath is Cusk’s account of the end of her 10-year marriage. It is extremely frank, sparing little of her erstwhile husband’s privacy or that of her children, over whom the warring parents have been fighting.

There are two notable diamond jubilees this year: the obvious one and Jewish Book Week (JWB). The festival opened last weekend and will run at Kings Place in London until Sunday evening, when David Aaronovitch and Umberto Eco will end proceedings with a discussion about the latter’s novel, The Prague Cemetery. JBW is a celebration of literature; but, as one might expect, Jewish identity is central to most events. Yesterday afternoon saw Dennis Marks and Michael Hofmann debating the life and work of Joseph Roth — one of that band of writers (Kafka, Mann and Zweig) who described southern and eastern Europe during and after the collapse of the Hapsburg empire.