Culture

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. Amiability can take you a long way in British public life. James Corden is no fool: he co-wrote and co-starred in three series of Gavin and Stacey, and wowed the National Theatre this summer with a barnstorming performance in One Man, Two Guvnors. But there’s no doubt that his Fat Lad Made Good persona, and his almost puppyish desire to please, have contributed to a popularity that other, more guarded performers can only envy. His memoir, May I Have Your Attention, Please?, has barrelled straight into the top ten bestsellers list. It has loads of energy and some good stories. But Corden is only 33.

Picasso once told Roland Penrose, his friend and biographer, that he left Barcelona in 1900 to go to England, the home of his idols Edward Burne-Jones and Aubrey Beardsley. It took Picasso 19 years to get here, when the Ballet Russes took him to London to design its production of Le Tricorne. In honour of that history, next year Tate Britain and the English National Ballet will collaborate on a Picasso exhibition, examining his influence on British artists and his relationship with the British public. Judging by the preview, which was held this morning in the studio Picasso used on Floral Street in Covent Garden, the show merits a visit.

There was no catch because no one wanted out. The late Joseph Heller has been in the news today. The auction of letters he wrote to an American academic in the ‘70s has revealed that he “enjoyed” the war, which may come as a surprise to those who thought Yossarian, the US Army Air Force bombardier who served in Italy, was a proxy for Heller, the US Army Air Force bombardier who served in Italy. This story raises an old contention: that characters can be engendered simply in a writer’s mind's eye and are not necessarily derived from either the quick or the dead. This was a major bugbear of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, who both contested the facile belief that every character has one ultimate source in reality.

This is one hell of a statistic: In Britain, taxes on all types of alcohol contributed 36 percent of national revenue in 1898-99, but they were also 19 percent in France (1898), 18 percent in Germany (1897-98), and 28 percent in the United States (1897-98). That's from a new book by James Simpson Creating Wine, the Emergence of a World Industry 1840-1914. This seems hard to believe until one recalls how little governments spent on anything back in the late-Victorian era. Nevertheless, there you have it: boozers kept Britain afloat then just as drinkers and smokers do more than their bit to fund the government these days. Even so: 36%! There's something almost heroic about that.

It’s a shame The Sense of an Ending won the Booker. Not because the prize wasn’t deserved — based on that shortlist, I’m sure the judges made the right decision — but because I don’t think it shows its author in his best light. In time, probably around now, people will forget the hoo-ha over the 2011 Man Booker Prize. No one will remember that X said her five-year-old could have come up with a better shortlist, or that Y told X to stop being such an elitist snob. And I worry that readers coming to Barnes afresh, assuming The Sense of an Ending to be his best book, will be disappointed. Which would be sad because he’s a brilliant writer, the first modern grown-up novelist I really fell in love with.