Culture

A change from the usual format this week, as it is Armistice Day. This clip is taken from a documentary made in conjunction with Simon Armitage’s 2008 war collection, The Not Dead. The veteran is quoting from Armitage’s poem, ‘The Malaya Emergency’. It speaks for itself. Later today, Radio Four’s afternoon play will be devoted to Andrew Motion’s new volume of war poetry.

Jane Asher is second in the hot seat. She tells us how to get children reading; who she would have a literary fling with and what exactly would make her end a friendship. 1) What are you reading at the moment? Inspired by seeing her interviewed recently, I’m catching up with Diana Athill’s collected memoirs: I’ve got to half way through ‘Instead of a Letter’. She writes so beautifully and frankly that she makes the most mundane events completely fascinating. 2) As a child, what did you read under the covers? Sherlock Holmes; Frances Hodgson Burnett (particularly A Little Princess) and the Dimsie books by Dorita Fairlie Bruce 3) Has a book ever made you cry, and if so which one?

The four-hundredth anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible has produced some great books. Almost all aspects have been covered: the general histories of Melvyn Bragg and Gordon Campbell ranged over the politics and history, while David Crystal’s Begat showed how its idioms and phrases have percolated through our language. Now, in The Shadow of a Great Rock, Harold Bloom finishes the year by approaching the KJV as a work of art.   With a working knowledge of Hebrew and Greek, he shuffles between the original languages and a variety of English translations — Tyndale, the Geneva Bible and the King James itself. This approach makes for one of the book’s great strengths, namely the rich spread of quotation.

Richard Bradford styled his biography of Martin Amis as ‘The biography’, an odious gesture that would tempt fate on even the busiest day. Are there any scoops? With the exception of a few mild indiscretions from Christopher Hitchens — no, there are not. Early in the piece, Bradford thanks Amis for his ‘co-operation’, which amounted to five face-to-face interviews. That spirit of co-operation dissolved into acrimony at some stage, and the publication of this book has been marred by difficulties and delays.  What are the critics saying? It’s a stinker, they say as one. On these pages, Sam Leith observed that Bradford struggles to describe Amis’ writing, which is a drawback for a literary biography.

As Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan opens at the National Gallery, Daisy Dunn looks at his famous Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari. Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Most Eminent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects, commonly abbreviated to The Lives is not what one might expect of a history, or a biography, or an art book of any kind. Its sixteenth-century Italian audience probably found it equally genre-defying. Discursive, inaccurate, shot through with an agenda that corrupted objectivity, Vasari’s Lies, as it is often called, is nonetheless indispensible, especially to students of Leonardo da Vinci.   Vasari was an artist before he was an artists’ biographer. He was good but never great, and he probably knew it.

The Man Booker committee has appointed Peter Stothard as the chairman of next year’s judges. What a dreary decision. I’ve nothing against Sir Peter Stothard; the TLS is a fine, upstanding publication — although whether it can be said to ‘zip along’ is a matter of taste. No, it’s more that in picking someone so literary establishment, so safe, they’ve shown the bullies did get to them after all. It’s like being teased at school for your pigtails, pretending you don’t care, then turning up the next day with a ponytail. Or a weak government U-turning on policy (to their credit, none of the Man Booker people has come out and tried to claim this year’s prize was in fact a consultation process with readers).

Tomorrow is E-Day: the publication of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery. The book concerns the fictitious Protocols of the Elders of Zion and how they were still accepted even after being exposed as a fabrication in 1921. This is natural territory for Eco the semiotician. He told the Times (£): 'I always had an interest for the problem of lying, fakes and forgeries from the semiotic point of view. It’s a fundamental human activity to lie more than to tell the truth. The problem of the Protocols fascinated me. Just because of its capability to resist any form of proof and criticism, it means that it’s a text that is able to touch the deepest prejudice in the human soul.