Culture

What’s the future for the footnote? Seems a strange question to ask about such an antiquated device. But modern technology, I think, could see a renaissance for that tricky little beast lurking at the bottom of the page. The thought has occurred because I’m currently reading one of those books (a real one, that is, a “dead tree” version) whose footnotes are all at the end, rather than on the page they relate to. Annoying, because each time you reach one you have to flick forward a couple of hundred pages. Most of the notes, it’s true, are just source citations, giving no additional information. But the odd one is a ‘proper’ footnote, containing a juicy little fact or anecdote. Can’t risk missing those, can you?

Over at Guardian Books, Irish playwright Belinda McKeon has picked her top 10 farming novels. Here’s her list: 1. Stoner by John Williams 2. Tarry Flynn by Patrick Kavanagh 3. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 4. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans 5. That They May Face The Rising Sun by John McGahern 6. How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff 7. Foster by Claire Keegan 8. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons 9. God's Own Country by Ross Raisin 10.

Why do I keep hearing about Dickens? This is just the start of it. 7 February 2012 is the bicentennary of Dickens’ birth, and there are all sorts of commemorative shenanigans planned for next year. Expect lots more biographies and documentaries. Who’s Claire Tomalin? An award-winning biographer of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield. Her background is journalism rather than academia. She’s married to the author Michael Frayn. What’s the deal with this biography? Tomalin’s book claims to offer a concise, rounded portrait of the man and his work.

Thank you to all those readers who entered our online poetry competition last week. There were lots of novel, witty and entertaining entries on the ostensibly mundane subject of ‘games’. The winner is ‘hc18’, who should contact dblackburn @ spectator.co.uk to claim their bottle of champagne. Here is the winning entry: 'The sweat, the fear, the aching limbs, the scowling face of Mr. Symms. The pain, the tears, the shrieks and howls. the muck, the grime, those sweaty towels. Running round the pitch in rain. "You've done it once, get to it again!" Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry, Mud on your face and grit in your eye... How I miss those days back then, before I'd picked up this bloody pen!

Sophia Waugh has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. There is an old joke which says that if you are lost in the desert, start making a salad dressing as someone will pop out of a sand dune and tell you that you are making it the wrong way. This, in essence, is what Felicity Cloake does in her recipe book Perfect. And the idea is a good one. Cloake has done all the hard work — read all the top cookery writers, tried out their versions, and then picked the best, or ‘Perfect’ one. So you have 68 ‘perfect’ recipes. The title is meant to be comforting, or encouraging, but it could be a little dangerous.

1) The official announcement of Tomas Transtömer's victory  2) The one person in Britain we can be absolutely certain has read Transtömer: his translator.  3) An excellent summary of the preceding hoaxes and Dylanology. 4) John Dugdale on the Nobel committee's chequered history in literary matters.  5) No announcement yet on the Nobel laureate in Ted Gioia's alternate universe.

How many times must a man be considered "overlooked" or recalled as a "forgotten genius" before it must become apparent to even the meanest inteligence that he can no longer sensibly be considered "forgotten" or "overlooked"? This is something worth observing in the case of Brian O'Nolan, better known to you perhaps as Flann O'Brien and, to the true cognoscenti, as Myles na Gopaleen too. What with an official stamp available as of this very day, the centenary of his emergence in bonny Strabane, a lengthy piece by Fintan O'Toole to say nothing of puffery in the New Yorker and the Guardian and lord knows where else, you cannot credibly say the old fella has been forgotten.

Inspired by Boris's recent oration, I was going to compose an epigram in praise of his prose, a dirty limerick in honour of his hobbies and a white paper for the promise of his politics. That was until I came across the unthinkable: Boris Johnson split the infinitive. He'll probably try and defend himself: the Mayor of London can't proof read every Greater London Press Release - and Greater London isn't even really London - and so it's unfair to hold him directly responsible. But, it happened on his watch. Last week's press release "Mayor tightens grip on disruptive roadworks in London" contained not one but two horribly dismembered infinitives, namely: "to now use" and  "to properly charge".

This review of Thomas Penn's biography of Henry VII, by Leanda de Lisle, is taken from the latest issue of the magazine. It is reproduced here for readers of this blog. There is something of Gordon Brown in the older Henry VII: an impression of darkness, of paranoia and barely suppressed rage, not to mention the terrifying tax grabs and tormenting of enemies. But Gordon was never quite as entertaining, or frightening, as Thomas Penn’s Winter King in this brilliant mash-up of gothic horror and political biography. David Starkey once declared Henry VII ‘boring’.

Jonathan Sumption admires the sweep and bravura  of Max Hastings’s account without agreeing with every word The second world war is still generally regarded as the ‘good war’. In the moral balance, the cause of the Axis powers was so unspeakably bad that their adversaries have rarely had to justify themselves. But there is, perhaps, more to it than the moral balance. The second war has gained in public esteem by being everything that the first war was not. It was fought for recognisable and, on the whole admirable, objectives. It did not begin, as the first had, among the conspiratorial fumblings of European chanceries. It did not become an object in itself.