Culture

It is noticeable that the kind of young woman that a clever public man most likes talking to is intelligent but totally unchallenging. This is pleasant for both. She gets to pick up useful knowledge, while he can hold forth, happy that she doesn’t have the inclination or firepower to disagree, argue or interrupt.    Dr Johnson was a bit like that. He wanted women to be equal ‘but not too equal’.  Hannah More, a successful playwright young enough to be his daughter, had too much natural self-belief for him, and he did not admire her dress sense. He was wary and in awe of the confident poet Elizabeth Carter, who knew more Latin and Greek than he did.

If you’re the sort of person who can’t get enough of literary biography then you’re spoilt for choice this autumn. Our bookshops – what’s left of them – are bursting with writerly lives and letters. Here’s what the critics made of the ten most-talked-about titles: Martin Amis: The Biography by Richard Bradford This sympathetic biography has got some pretty dreadful reviews, as you’ll know if you’ve read the Spectator’s Briefing Note. David Sexton’s hatchet job in the Evening Standard was the most brutal. ‘His book is unreadably poor.

The Charlie Rose show is a cultural treasure, provided you ignore the host. In this instance, the late John Updike talks about the art of fiction from the perspective of the character he is “measured against”, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom. In two and half minutes of candour, Updike reveals much about his method and how his most famous creation altered that method. Their relationship extended beyond the page and into Updike’s body and soul; he even admits that they transferred ailments. To all intents and purposes, Rabbit was real.

This is the second instalment of Emily Rhodes’ Inside Books series. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but anyone with even a poor sense of smell and negligible knowledge of botany will have noticed that some roses smell sweeter than others. The same goes for the names of books. As some titles evidently smell particularly sweet, there can be some rather unexpected bookish twins. Last week, several children — and a few doting parents — rushed into the bookshop to ask if we had Inheritance. I had to quell my initial instinct to show them Robert Sackville-West’s Inheritance, his very good book about Knole.

An anonymous buyer paid more than £7,000 at Sotheby’s last night for the late Nat Tate’s signature work, Bridge No.114. The money will go to the Artists’ General Benevolent Fund because, of course, Nat Tate never existed — he was the invention of the novelist William Boyd, who also painted the atrocious picture above.  Tate was conceived in 1998, at the height of the fever for the Young British Artists, when Boyd decided to play an intellectual game. He would test the credulity of the art world by writing the biography of a fictional artist. Boyd's imagination conjured an unappreciated American genius, whose work had been lost his contemporaries.

Anyone who’s been charged with plagiarism knows there are two ways to save face. Either own up and claim you were making a statement, or deny and employ the ‘Great Minds’ defence, like I did when accused of copying Tacitus in my A-Level history coursework. The funny thing about Q.R. Markham, whose much-hyped spy thriller has been pulped after readers discovered it was a patchwork of other novels, is that he’s stayed silent. Naturally, this has prompted others to invent their own theories as to what the Brooklyn bookseller, real name Quentin Rowan, was up to.

The weekend’s literary pages sounded the Last Post in honour of Remembrance Sunday. The re-release of Sir Andrew Motion’s collection of war poems, Laurels and Donkeys, is being feted by critics. And Motion read from the book at a party in Oxford on Friday night, a memorable experience for those who witnessed it.  The former Poet Laureate also took part in a discussion about new war literature for the Guardian, together with Michael Morpurgo and Luisa Young. The events of the Great War have now, for the most part, passed out of living memory and into history.