Culture

I entered the Harbour Bookshop in Dartmouth in search of warmth. I had been camped on Dartmoor for a couple of nights, taking part in a cadet weekend, back in the days when I believed the army might be my vocation. Dartmouth is several miles from the Dartmoor National Park and a section of 13 year old boys dreaming of being men marched off the park onto the quiet road that led to Totnes and then followed the broadening line of the river Dart to the sea. This being England in the height of summer, the rain was falling horizontally. After 10 miles or so of this relentless tempest, the boys would be men no longer. Finally, a bedraggled troop of latter day Just Williams traipsed into Dartmouth in search of warmth and teacakes.

Behind fashion as usual, I’ve finally read One Day, the runaway success by David Nicholls. To be honest, I was slightly underwhelmed by the time I finished it. The combination of too much hype and the excruciating plot contrivance in the closing pages left me unsatisfied – irritated even. But, I’m largely nit-picking. It’s an extraordinary achievement to have created so much public affection with a book, especially one so slight. One Day is good clean fun; it’s not Madame Bovary. Its success, I think, lies is Nicholls’ adept use of set pieces to drive both plot and character, and his brilliance with dialogue.

1) The Edinburgh Book Festival has begun in earnest this week. The festival is one of the lengthiest in the country, running from 13-29 of August. The festival was originally launched in 1983 and staged every two years before becoming a yearly feature in 1997. The Book festival links in with the other festivals in Edinburgh - the Jazz festival, International festival, the Art festival, the Fringe, the Film festival and the Edinburgh Mela - and is thus able to claim to be part of 'the biggest and best arts festival in the world.' 2) Many of the UK's best known authors are due on the festival stage this year. Writers already sold out include A.C. Grayling, Alexander McCall Smith, Evan Davis, Simon Callow, Wendy Cope and Ian Rankin.

It was 70 years ago yesterday that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, floating perilously across a sea of U-boats, signed the declaration of wartime aims that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter.   The maps preserved at the Churchill War Rooms (CWR), Churchill’s former Westminster bunker, are heavily speckled by pinholes, not least across the Atlantic Ocean. Marking out the paths of convoys used to supply Britain even before this date, these carefully placed pins acquired even greater significance when Roosevelt and Churchill signed the Charter in a secret meeting aboard the USS Augusta on 14 August 1941.

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: Comedy is a serious business. The number of young people who seek to make a living making other people laugh seems to grow every year. Jonathan Lynn starts Comedy Rules by insisting that it is not a primer for would-be writers, but of course it is, and much more. Lynn was at Cambridge with the Pythons and the Goodies, co-wrote the Doctor series in the 1970s and Yes, Minister in the 1980s, and has since carved out a career directing comedy films in Hollywood, some of them funnier than others. But as Rule 138 (of 150) states, ‘Nobody knows how the audience will react to any play or film or joke.

1.) Colin Dexter's famous creation, Inspector Endeavour Morse, is due to fill our screens once more. ITV has announced that a new Morse film will be on the box next year. However, it comes with a twist. The film will be set in 1965 and feature a younger version of Morse, who will be played by Shaun Evans. The airing is set to coincide with the twenty-fifty anniversary of the first ever screening of Dexter's famous sleuth, back in 1987. Evans has said that he is 'very excited' about the role and that he hopes the new outing 'can complement what's come before, by telling a great story, and telling it well.' Dexter meanwhile, in a typically artful piece of verbal play, said: 'Immortal was Endeavour Morse - End-eavour more shall be so!' 2.

A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman is a rare example of a dying breed: the collected short stories. Spanning from 1966 to 2000, the singularly spindly tales document the heady social change of the period in question. But more than that, they demonstrate the delightfully tricksy nature of the short story as a form: from workaday realism to postmodern artfulness, and every shade between.   It is easy to misread Drabble through the fog of reputation. Few living writers have the clout, or the DBEs to go with it, that both she and her sister (one A.S. Byatt) can boast by the bucketload. But, of course, the first stories in this collection speak without all of that.

This morning’s Bookseller observes that, with one or two exceptions, bookshops have escaped from being looted during the recent London riots. Independent shops and high street retailers alike remain largely unscathed; even those situated in Croydon and Hackney, where criminality was particularly acute yesterday. Electrical shops and sports clothing vendors have, of course, fared less well. The damage to retailers and tourism in London is going to be extensive, further undermining Britain’s fragile economic recovery. I will leave readers to draw their own conclusions about what all of this says about the looters and their apologists, although the video above should sway undecided minds.

Exciting news. New York Magazine reports that Jesse Eisenberg has been cast in a film adaptation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's novella, The Double. Eisenberg is to be directed by Richard Ayoade, known to British audiences for his comedic roles in The IT Crowd, The Mighty Boosh and Man to Man with Dean Learner. Ayoade made his directorial debut earlier this year with Submarine, which was adapted from Joe Dunthorne’s adored novel of the same name. The plot of The Double revolves around Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a government clerk who finds he has been replaced by a man with his exact likeness.

The civilised world has always needed a lingua franca, through which educated people of international outlook can communicate with each other. For centuries that language was Latin, first the language of theology, then of learning — Erasmus, Milton and Thomas More communicated with a wide community of scholars in Latin. Nowadays, the international language of commerce and culture is English, and from Peru to Shanghai the employees of multinationals talk in their barbarous English idiolects of blue-sky thinking and learning curves, just as their children chant along to the lyrics of West Coast rap. Between the age of Erasmus and that of Ricky Martin, there occurred the supremacy of the French language.