Culture

Here is Costa Award winner Andrew Miller discussing his victory and talking about his book, Pure.

This week's Shelf Life features Alain de Botton, who is currently stoking controversy with his latest book, Religion for Atheists. De Botton, who tweets @alaindebotton, tells us which book he'd give a lover and why exactly he'd like to meet Madame Bovary. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Some porn: Modern Architecture since 1900, by William Curtis. Full of beautiful images and thought-provoking words. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? The Lego catalogue. I still can't entirely believe that now, as an adult, I could buy myself pretty much anything from the Lego catalogue without asking anyone for permission. Sadly though, the urge to do so has gone away. 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?

It’s a strange experience, to stand before the checked pinafore dress that Judy Garland wore in The Wizard of Oz. It is very plain, and its technicoloured blue has faded into a pallid grey. Yet it is instantly arresting, instantly fantastic. The word ‘iconic’ is as well-worn as an old jumper, but it’s an apt description of that simple dress and its place in Hollywood lore. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s major autumn exhibition this year is to be Hollywood Costume. You might sigh in anguish that the V&A has devoted yet another show to clothes and cinema — this will be its fourth in the last couple of years after Grace Kelly: Image of a Movie Star, Fashion Fantasies and the Concise Dictionary of Dress.

Jaipur — It was a sad weekend here for freedom of speech, as the Rushdie controversy took one strange turn after another. Having read from the banned The Satanic Verses on Friday night, in protest of Rushdie's absence at the festival, writers Hari Kunzru, Amitava Kumar, Ruchir Joshi and Jeet Thayil were advised by lawyers to leave Jaipur or risk arrest by Rajasthan authorities. By Saturday evening Kunzru was in Bangkok with his fiancée, the novelist Katie Kitamura, who had also been scheduled to speak at the festival. She said in an email that 'the situation developed incredibly fast, and we were obliged to leave the country almost immediately'. Kunzru later clarified on Twitter that he had left India of his own volition.

Did you survive without Wikipedia yesterday? English Wikipedia, and perhaps as many as 7,000 other websites, was blacked out for 24 hours in protest at the passage of two internet piracy bills through the US Congress. Simple souls merely dusted off their battered encyclopaedia, but the technically astute lifted the blackout with a host of sharp ruses and delicate subterfuge. This asks the question: can the internet be policed effectively when the intrepid will always bypass the impediments? The question has been exercising European governments and law courts for a number of years. In Britain, the Digital Economy Act (DEA) was given Royal Assent in the ‘wash up’ prior to the 2010 election.

The dowdy Queen Anne is back in fashion. Anne Somerset’s new biography of Queen Anne, that most enigmatic of monarchs, is published today. It is nearly 300 years since Anne’s death, and a popular account of her life is well overdue. She assumed the throne of a frankly second-rate power and left it a dominant force in global politics and commerce. That transformation is hugely important to the history of Britain as a nation state; and it merits widespread discussion because Anne’s crowning achievement, the Union of Scotland and England, is under threat. The book is timely; and it is also exhaustive — covering both the general political picture and Anne’s intimate history.

The Cold War produced some of the great classics of British spy fiction. From the gadgets and babes with exotic Eastern European accents of the James Bond books, to the non-stop action of Alistair MacLean or the dark treachery of John Le Carré and the intricate office politics of Len Deighton, it served as the perfect vehicle for just about every type of story a writer could imagine. More scenes were set in the few yards around Checkpoint Charlie than anyone could keep track of. But now there is a new type of cold war — one that is more literal than metaphorical. The Arctic is perhaps the most compelling region in the world to set a thriller in 2012 — which is why I chose to set my new novel Ice Force in the frozen wastelands around the North Pole.

John Burnside’s Black Cat Bone has won this year’s T.S. Eliot prize, the most controversial in years. Nominees Alice Oswald and John Kinsella withdrew from the prize on discovering that it was to be sponsored by a hedge fund, Aurum. Oswald’s objection was that “poetry should be challenging such institutions”, although she appeared to make little effort in understanding Aurum’s business and whether it merits censure — a possible oversight that was questioned by the Observer’s William Skidelsky. Meanwhile, Kinsella said that his withdrawal was the latest chapter in a career defined by “linguistic disobedience”, whatever that might be.