Culture

Cambridge academics spend a lot of time worrying about how to persuade taxpayers to keep them in ivory towers. Perhaps it’s for that reason that, twice a year, Cambridge Wordfest invites the reading public into the lecture theatre to be reminded how pleasant it is to chat about books. David Baddiel was there this weekend to discuss his latest novel. The Death of Eli Gold is about a heroically macho American novelist who finds that death is no respecter even of sexual reputations. Baddiel spoke about his desire to interrogate the fate of the Great Man in the modern world. Gold was one of these men.

How much would you spend on a joke stocking-filler? £5 £10 £15? Not much more than that, surely, the ways things are at present. This vacuous question was prompted by yesterday’s astonishing news that Penguin has apparently paid Pippa Middleton a £400,000 advance for a book on party giving, working title: How to be the Perfect Party Hostess. The Guardian’s Alison Flood relates how there was a 'fierce bidding war by some of Britain’s largest publishers' over Middleton’s first book, with Random House overwhelmed by Penguin at the eleventh hour. As Flood says, publishers obviously have faith in Middleton’s winning smile, so much faith in fact that they expect her to sell glossy tomes.

In some ways, publishing in early post-independence India was like publishing in pre-sixties Canada: cautiously seeking native voices without much financial success. Take GV Desani’s All About H Hatterr (1948), the first Indian novel to ‘go beyond the Englishness of the English language’ as Salman Rushdie once said. It languished out of print for many years, despite critical acclaim. Anita Desai and VS Naipaul’s classics may sell well today, but when they started out in the sixties, their readership was select and modest. In the seventies and eighties, new writers like Manohar Malgaonkar and Aubrey Menon as well as the popular RK Narayan, came to prominence in journals like the seminal Illustrated Weekly of India.

Several usually eloquent pens spat venom last weekend. The spat between Niall Ferguson and Pankaj Mishra and the London Review of Books has escalated. You might recall that Ferguson and Mishra trading insults over the latter’s review of the former’s book Civilisation; their acrimony has been underscored by references to racism. Mishra has since said that Ferguson is not a racist; but the matter remains unresolved. Ferguson has had another letter of complaint published in the latest issue of the LRB. He opens by saying that Mishra is ‘in full and ignominious retreat’ and ends by writing, ‘I am still waiting for an apology, from both Pankaj Mishra and the editor who published his defamatory article.

Do you fancy yourself as an edgy literary type? Have you got a thing for Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn Monroe by Norman Mailer and Bert Stern, could be the Christmas present for you. The handsome photo-book is a combination of Mailer’s cool prose and some of the most ‘revealing, intimate’ shots of Marilyn ever taken. (Revealing and intimate, in this context, means Monroe’s nipples can be seen.) All this at a time when Marilyn chic is back, what with the new biopic starring Michelle Williams. What’s not to like? Well, there’s the outrageous price: $1000 (about 650 quid).

What to do if you want to write a novel, but can’t find a plot (in the broadest sense of the term) around which to frame your ideas? Give up, is Margaret Atwood’s stark advice. There is no formula, she says, no easy answer to writing fiction. Most people have a creative spark, but not everyone has the intellect to discipline it. You either have it or you don’t. So much for the truism that everyone has at least one novel in them.

Amanda Craig tells us what she would title her memoirs, which book reduces her to tears and the 19th century literary heart throb her husband most looks like.  1) What are you reading at the moment? I always read several books at once, so it’s Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis biography (review), Julia Jones’s A Ravelled Flag (children’s review), Anthony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes novel The House of Silk (fun) and Anthony Trollope’s The Belton Estate (fun.) 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Almost everything, because if a book isn’t worth reading under the covers it isn’t worth reading at all. The kind of book people read in public is always a form of ostentation.

As part of our book of the month coverage, here is Nicholas Lezard's review of Anthony Horowitz's The House of Silk, taken from the current issue of the Spectator. You can read other posts on the book here. So: does Moriarty exist, or not? Well no, not really, and not just in the literal sense of being a fictional character. He’s hardly even that. We have no evidence beyond Sherlock Holmes’s word, and if you look at Holmes’s behaviour in ‘The Final Problem’ you can see an almost classic case of paranoia — brought on, no doubt, by a heavy cocaine binge.