Culture

Two centuries ago, Edmund Burke famously mocked the intellectuals of revolutionary France for trying to devise a perfectly rational constitution for their country. The Abbé Sieyès, he wrote, had whole nests of pigeon-holes full of constitutions, ready made, ticketed, sorted and numbered, suited to every season and every fancy . . . so that no constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shop. The Abbé Sieyès has had his imitators in England lately. The last government devoted much intellectual energy and parliamentary time to producing a theoretical separation of the judiciary from the legislature and the executive, when a practical separation had existed for years.

Mark Mason has written the Bookend column in the latest issue of The Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog. It is 1979. You are a 15-year-old boy starring in a hit US television show. You’ve seen the crowds of screaming girls outside the gates as you arrive for work, and are therefore very excited to have received your first fan letter. You open it eagerly and begin to read: ‘Dear Mr Rob Lowe, You are a great actor. Can you please send me an autographed photo of yourself? If possible in a bathing suit or in your underwear. Sincerely, Michael LeBron. #4142214 Pelican Bay Prison.’ Anyone who thinks of Lowe as Action Man made flesh (blandly handsome, zero personality) will be pleasantly surprised by his autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends.

The hardback edition of D.R. Thorpe's Supermac is 626 pages in length (not including endnotes and index), 24cm x 16cm x 6cm in girth, and weighs in at more than one kilogram – on first appearances, not a book for a beach holiday. Or so I thought, because despite the corporeal hardships of reading this on a sunbed in mercury-popping heat, I was transfixed. And now I have the forearms to prove it. Thorpe gravitates between dextrous prose and a judicial exposition of evidence, such as when taking the reader through the controversial Cossacks repatriation episode, or the quandary of royal prerogative during the handover to Lord Home.

The Hay Festival has ended, but so much of this enormous festival went largely unreported. Here’s the final dispatch from George Binning: Richard E Grant’s conversation with Peter Godwin about Mugabe’s regime and Godwin’s latest book, The Fear, gave us a nuanced insight into African politics that could not have been written by the Western press. Godwin, who fought against Mugabe in the civil war, started by describing the dichotomy of being a white African, especially when lecturing to audiences of predominantly black American students who had never been to Africa themselves, but still identified with the continent.

The Hay Festival has ended, but reports from this enormous festival do not. Here’s another dispatch from George Binning: In 1977, having started a craze for second hand book shops and festivals in Hay on Wye, Richard Booth crowned himself King of Hay. He also appointed a chamber of hereditary peers in 2000 (a nice little earner), but in spite of his lifelong contribution to Hay's cultural landscape, a large number of the locals think he is a wally. In fact one man tells me that there was a sort of revolution a few years ago where an angry mob ritually beheaded an effigy of Booth. He recently sold Hay Castle for around the two million mark and there are fears that the castle will be closed off and redecorated.

Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours, disabuses readers of the Guardian of their misconceptions about Virginia Woolf. ‘Virginia Woolf was great fun at parties. I want to tell you that up front, because Woolf, who died 70 years ago this year, is so often portrayed as the Dark Lady of English letters, all glowery and sad, looking balefully on from a crepuscular corner of literary history with a stone lodged in her pocket. She did, of course, have her darker interludes. More on that in a moment.

Colin Amery has written the Bookend column in this week's issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of this blog: It may have been first published in 1973, but reading it again in Persephone Books’ elegant re-print, Adam Fergusson’s The Sack of Bath remains a real shocker. The fury of his polemic against the powers in Bath that seemed hell-bent on destroying everything except a few grand Georgian set- pieces in that beautiful city still has a terrible relevance today. Looking at the photographs of acres of modest stone houses being reduced to rubble to be replaced by unbelievably low grade ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ is utterly depressing.