Culture

1) Last week, P.D. James was awarded the Theakstons Old Peculiar Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. James has been publishing for fifty years. Her first novel, Cover Her Face, appeared in 1962. Her most recent work, the non-fiction book Talking About Detective Fiction, was published in 2009. Speaking recently to the BBC, James hinted that she was working on something new: 'I am still writing, but something very different; something shorter and something which I'm keeping very secret at the moment.' She later admitted that it did not feature her long-time detective, Adam Dalgliesh.   2) P.D. James is one of the oldest writers still putting pen to paper. She turns 91 this year.

Which books are making the critics lose their cool? We’ve rounded up the best bad reviews: Mary Beard (Guardian) on Rome by Robert Hughes “The first half of the book, especially the three chapters dealing with the early history of Rome, from Romulus to the end of pagan antiquity, is little short of a disgrace — to both author and publisher. It is riddled with errors and misunderstandings that will mislead the innocent and infuriate the specialist.” Matthew Syed (The Times) on Ghost Milk by Iain Sinclair “Psychogeography, it would seem, at least in the hands of Sinclair, is not merely obscure, but impenetrable.

It’s a rare life to be a Classics don, and now you can try your hand at it. The process is remarkably simple: go to Oxford University’s Ancient Lives website, where the university’s enormous archive of ancient manuscripts has been stored, and take a very quick tutorial. After that, you will be presented with an untranslated fragment. You can read the letters or hieroglyphs by matching them up with those contained in a transliteration tool situated beneath the fragment; you can also measure papyri using a simple scrolling tool. The aim is to discover if the document has been translated by an academic.

A friend of mine was throttled by Pete Postlethwaite once. It was outside a TV studio, people were smoking and Postlethwaite was only demonstrating some bit of business he had done while playing Macbeth, but even so, very few of us can claim to have been strangled by someone Steven Spielberg once called ‘the best actor in the world’. Postlethwaite died in January, to a vast and unexpected surge of public grief. Now arrives an autobiography, A Spectacle of Dust (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20), written during illness, incomplete at death, finished by other hands. But there’s no doubt it’s the real thing. Postlethwaite was an unusually open, emotional actor, both strong and vulnerable, never terribly bothered about being liked.

Geoff Dyer begins his new New York Times column with an excellent stylistic joke. Aggregators are destined to conquer the world (me probably excepted). Mrs Murdoch oughtta be in chicklit. Two pieces of interesting news from the Millions: you'll feel less guilt about reading a book in the bath if it's already dirty; and Ayn Rand's editor was a communist. Mark Twain's advice for little girls, illustr ks+ated .

It’s a tradition of the British summer. A Tory MP produces a summer reading list of weighty and worthy tomes to co-incide with the summer recess. This year, Keith Simpson has compiled the list, and as you can see it's long as your arm. Spectator Book Blog contributor Nik Darlington has made a few selections from the list. And of course, we'd like CoffeeHousers' recommendations too. Diary: Alastair Campbell, Diaries Vol. II: Power and the People and Diaries Vol. III: Power & Responsibility. Peter Catterall (editor), The Macmillan Diaries Vol. II: Prime Minister and After, 1957-1966. Earl Ferrers, Whatever Next? Reminiscences of a journey through life.

The blackly comic Pickerskill Reports have returned to Radio Four, in a news series starring Ian McDiarmid. Here's an exclusive video of McDiarmid introducing the new series and the quintessentially British character at its heart.

Piet Barol is young man contentedly conscious of the fact that he is ‘extremely attractive to most women and to many men’. Lucky Piet. His good looks do him no harm when he arrives in Amsterdam in 1907 to be interviewed for the position of tutor to a rich hotelier’s son. The job is his after a little flirtation with the lady of the house, and throughout the rest of the novel Piet sets to work on using his new position as a first step towards the life of luxury he feels (as most good-looking young people do) is his natural right. One of the other things he has to set to work on is his employer’s wife, who holds him to the promises of his initial sauciness. But Piet likes an older woman, so that’s alright.

The Observer reports that publishers are seeking out five major music stars who are to write their memoirs, such was the success of Keith Richards’s book and the life. ‘Call them the Big Five. Game hunters have their wish-list of trophy animals, and rock music has its own – the elite group of rock stars yet to be bagged for publishing deals. This month, after HarperCollins snapped up the autobiography of Pete Townshend of the Who after a bidding war, publishers' sights are firmly set on the few remaining major talents to have held back from a book deal. Paul McCartney, Elton John, Robert Plant and Bruce Springsteen are on that list, but at the top for many in the book industry is David Bowie.

The complexities of using the word douchebag in an essay on Dante. The risks of attempting to take Thomas Kinkade seriously. A great answer to the "Have you really read all those books?" question. A home for unfinished novels. An almost instant bookshop.