Culture

A.L. Kennedy is a very remarkable writer. And her new novel — the first since Day won the Costa prize in 2007 — is a remarkable book. What is really extraordinary about it is that at one level it is a pretty trite love story with dark secrets to be revealed and lots of reflection on truth and lies and how the past lingers on and affects the present — bog-standard stuff. The basic set-up is somewhat improbable, and (as always with Kennedy) somewhat elliptical, even evasive. Elizabeth, the protagonist, is crossing the Atlantic on a cruise ship with her boyfriend who may or may not be planning to marry her.

Marcus Berkmann writes the Bookends column for this week's issue of The Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Of all the great cultural shifts of recent years, the rise to respectability of American comics may be the strangest. Once, Superman, Batperson and the like were just lowbrow trash for kids, but while some of us were looking in the opposite direction they acquired legendary status and became the cornerstones of Western civilisation. Now every other new film features a superhero, backed up by astounding special effects and a marketing budget that could start a small war. Excellent timing, then, for British comics author Grant Morrison to produce Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero (Jonathan Cape, £17.

Here’s some news that you may have missed from last week: World Book Night is to be extended to America. The American arm will be led by Carl Lennertz, currently with Harper Collins, and former head of marketing at Foyles, Julia Kingsford, is to become chief executive of the whole charity. The organisers hope that World Book Night is going to live up to its name and make the love of reading and books a global experience. The event opened in Britain earlier this year and it was an unqualified success. The spectacle of thousands of people donating 1 million books to strangers on Britain’s streets was extensively featured in newspapers and trailed heavily on BBC 2 and Radio 4. A few dissenters growled beneath the fanfare.

In November 1844, Dostoyevsky finished writing his first story. He confides in Diary of a Writer that he had ‘written nothing before that time’. Having recently finished translating Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, he suddenly felt inspired to write a tale ‘of the same dimensions’. But he was not only prompted by artistic aspirations. In a letter to his brother, Mikhail, just a few months earlier, he mentions being satisfied with a work-in-progress, and his hopes for greater financial stability: ‘I may get 400 rubles for it,’ he wrote, ‘and therein lie all my hopes.’ First published in 1846, Poor Folk was both a critical and financial success, with one prominent critic suggesting that Dostoyevsky could become the next Gogol.

Andrew Taylor wrote the Bookends column for this week's issue of The Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: Ruth Rendell has probably pulled more surprises on her readers than any other crime writer. But the one she produces with her latest novel is a little unusual even by her standards. Set in the present, The Vault (Hutchinson, £18.99) deals with the discovery of four corpses in the disused coal hole of a Georgian cottage in St John’s Wood. The main investigator is Rendell’s long-running series hero, Chief Inspector Wexford, now retired and living part-time in Hampstead. Called in, a little implausibly, as a police adviser, he copes with what are in effect two murder cases, with different timescales, victims, motives — and killers.

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.