Culture

Have you ever wondered how a Nobel Prize committee works? If so, then look no further than Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who has disinterred the 1961 literature panel’s minutes, the Guardian reports. There is little mystery: the judges convene to discuss nominees just as any other prize panel would, although with perhaps more self-regard than is customary. In 1961, for instance, the judges rejected Robert Frost and E.M. Forster for being too old, and Lawrence Durrell for his ‘monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications’. Italian novelist Alberto Moravia was overlooked because his prose amounted to ‘a general monotony’. What on earth would they have made of Umberto Eco?  The same panel blocked J.R.R.

The same question arises every year: what on earth to buy my uncle for Christmas? Crisis was averted in 2011 by the admirable Mark Forsyth, whose book The Etymologicon (Icon) is a jaunty stroll through idiomatic English, guaranteed to tickle the avuncular tendency. The Etymologicon was the sale of the season, so popular that bookshops could not supply public demand. All hands were at the printing presses as emergency runs were produced; the books were then apparently hand-delivered by Icon’s staff to bookshops desperate to profit from the public's fever. Exact figures are not yet available, but it seems that more than 50,000 copies have been sold.

E-books can be a strange, parochial beast. As any Kindle-user will know, the content of the Kindle store often varies wildly in terms of design and reading experience. Classics suffer especially from this. A lot of out-of-copyright classics have been digitized by volunteers and are available free, but devoid of any notes, substantial chapter headings and basic page formatting. Even worse, output from some of the big publishing houses proves little better. Pages are inadequately formatted, the type isn’t adjustable; and infuriating gaps exist between paragraphs, while the font often renders sentences unintelligible. But there are some saints among the throng of sinners.

Devout readers of the Spectator will know Marcus Berkmann well. He is a regular book reviewer and writes a column about music that no one else listens to — he admits as much in public, and does so without a shade of embarrassment. He views the horrendous prospect of ageing in the same breezy manner. His new book, A Shed of One’s Own, regards the inevitable march of age and concludes that we mustn’t worry about it. What you’ve lost in physique (assuming you ever had it), you’ve gained immeasurably in knowledge. The key is to use that nous for the greater good. The publishers declare that Berkmann has mastered midlife without the crisis. Now there’s a promise to rejuvenate your sagging resolve in the New Year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDwnHP-tUz0 While the Kindle continues to solve storage problems for the bibliophile on the go, it is the iPad that is actually changing what books are and stretching our definitions of reading. Here is my selection of the ten best iBooks released for it this year:  The Waste Land  To anyone unconvinced about the appeal of iBooks, I can only present this, the greatest edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land that has ever been published. You can use it to read the poem, with or without notes, or to have the poem read to you by the likes of Eliot and Alec Guinness.

Alexander McCall Smith shows no sign of tiring, which will come as good or bad news depending on your view. He has numerous titles out next year. There is yet another instalment of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detection Agency: The Limpopo Agency of Private Detection will be published in hardback on March 1. No further comment is required because McCall Smith’s sleuthing formula is as famous as the Voodoo-Hoodoo. Next, the latest episodes of McCall Smith’s Corduroy Mansions experiment, A Conspiracy of Friends. This was originally an eBook, serialised on the Telegraph’s website. The plan was to revive the episodic form by which Dickens, Thackeray et al wrote. Now, the complete work has been collected into a glossy hardback book.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Museum of London’s ‘Dickens and London’ exhibition is that it Dickens hardly features. Dickens’ novels and journalism describe the scene, but the man himself is largely unseen — one of many artistic figures in the throng of booming Victorian London. The Spectator’s obituary praised Dickens’ skill in ‘softening the lines of demarcation between the different classes of English Society.’ But he was not alone in this. Robert Dowling’s ‘Breakfasting Out’ is the best example of a trend in Victorian visual art for showing working people rubbing shoulders with the well to-do in everyday life.

Snowdrops, A. D. Miller’s literary thriller, has to qualify as the book I was ‘most unable to put down’ this year. It’s set in a contemporary Moscow which I instantly recognised — glamorous, vicious, amoral and terrifying all at once. Miller puts his finger right on what makes modern Russia so compelling to outsiders. When his main character, a bland Englishman, allows himself to be enticed into a scam involving beautiful girls, phony building permits, and enormous amounts of money we intuitively understand why. For those who prefer their scams closer to home, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, Michael Lewis’s book on the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crash is a brilliant read, and highly educational.

It was an exceptional year for the novel, with impressive books from Adam Mars-Jones, Ali Smith, Edward Docx, Edward St Aubyn, A.S.Byatt, Cressida Connolly, Ross Raisin, Amitav Ghosh, Tim Binding and Jeffrey Eugenides, just to mention a few. Many congratulations to the enterprising Hesperus for bringing a small but enchanting German classic, Hans Keilson’s Komodie in Moll, to English readers for the first time. The three new novels I’d particularly commend are, first, Robert Harris’s superb The Fear Index guaranteed to appeal to anyone who shudders when their laptop unaccountably fails to switch off. Secondly, my friend Alan Hollinghurst’s magnificent The Stranger’s Child, universally acclaimed as the best novel of the year.

What strange persons get themselves chosen to govern us. I have spent quite a bit of the past year reading some brilliant lives of our prime ministers, each of them heavy enough to sprain a wrist but light enough to tickle the imagination: in historical order, David Brown’s Palmerston, D. R. Thorpe’s Supermac: The Life of Harold Macmillan, and Philip Ziegler’s Edward Heath. Pam, Supermac and Ted managed to put across very different images of themselves, but all three were essentially solitary and implacable personalities who kept their enmities in better repair than their friendships, all unpopular in youth and chilly in old age.