Culture

Fay Maschler has written the Bookends column in this week's magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog. Sticky at Christmas, packed in serried rows around a plastic twig in an oval-ended paper-wrapped box with a picture of a camel train; dates in childhood were exotic. The mystery words Deglet Noor were as sweet to roll around the mouth as the fibrous fruit. But we learn from Dates – A Global History by Nawal Nasrallah that they are a staple food, comparable to wheat, potatoes and rice. The Edible Series focuses on one foodstuff per book. The result can be like an answer in a Chinese exam where everything known is written down, here in a prose style reminiscent of Wikipedia.

The Booktrust has cancelled the John Llewellyn Rhys prize this year because it is suffering a ‘lack of funds’. £13m was cut from the Booktrust’s annual grant from the Department of Education was cut earlier in the year and the organisation has been forced into retrenchment. Now, it is a pity that this widely respected prize will not be awarded this year. It is a favourite among the literati, many of whom owe their success to it. Margaret Drabble reveals in today’s Guardian that she would not have been introduced to the ‘London literary scene without the JLR’ and she labels it the ‘Booker without the back-stabbing’.

Book reviewers are, on the whole, a polite bunch, and rarely say what they really think. Instead they use a clever code, whereby “her most experimental novel yet” means “an utter mess”, “exhaustive and scholarly” = “I fell asleep”, “draws heavily on previous studies” = “the scoundrel has copied and pasted his entire book”, and so on.      Occasionally, however, a critic will lose it, and bludgeon their victim so violently they can only be identified by dental records.

Writer Giles Milton talks to Daisy Dunn about the relative who inspired both his family’s artistic passions and the narrative of his most recent book, Wolfram: The Boy who went to War, reviewed in the Spectator last month by Hester Vaizey. You note that the book grew out of many hours of interviews.  How long did the process take, and how did the book develop? It was quite a long process in getting my father-in-law, Wolfram, to talk about the War. He never spoke about his time in the Third Reich and during the whole Hitler period. I always wondered what he did, but that’s not really a question you can ask your father-in-law.

Once upon a time there was a future. H.G. Wells had seen it. Apparently it was going to be naked. Well that’s certainly the impression one gets from the dollops of sex folded into David Lodge’s novel on Wells’ life, A Man of Parts. I call the book a novel because it’s called one on the cover. But in reality I think Lodge has managed to out-Hamlet Hamlet and given us a new mixed genre perhaps best described as historico-biographical-novelistic-political-critical-gossip.  ‘Nearly everything that happens in this narrative,’ we are told in a short preface, ‘is based on factual sources’. Once you tuck in, however, it’s left to you to chew over each detail and guess at its reality or otherwise.

Lewis Jones has written this week's Bookend in the magazine. Here it is for readers of this blog: Books about Venice are almost as numerous as gondolas on the Grand Canal, but Robin Saikia is the first to write one about the Lido. The subject might be thought too insubstantial for a book of its own, and so it proves: excluding its index and appendices, The Venice Lido runs to a modest 132 pages of generously sized print. But what this monograph lacks in volume it makes up for in warmth, charm and eccentric scholarship.

1) The BBC Samuel Johnson Prize has a turbulent history. The prize came into being after the NCR prize fell into disrepute. Originally kept afloat courtesy of an anonymous donor, the BBC began sponsoring the prize in 2002 through its new channel BBC Four. This year, as part of the BBC's Year of Books, a special show will be aired exploring each of the six shortlisted writers for 2011 and announcing the winner. 2) The prize has the biggest victory pot of any non-fiction prize in the UK, with prize money of £20,000.