Culture

Jason Diamond, who writes for Jewcy, has compiled a list of the greatest Jewish literature of the last 100 years. Some wonderful choices are included, from Paul Auster's postmodern New York Trilogy to Joseph Heller's WWII satire, Catch 22, with Kafka, Proust and Salinger dominating the top spots. While the list does not claim to be definitive, it does offer a fascinating glimpse into a rich cultural history and a formidable literary heritage. But Diamond's selection is perhaps most distinctive for its variety. The top ten are all distinctive testaments to modern Jewish identity - secular and religious, liberal and orthodox, assimilated or persecuted. But that is not all.

American website Flavorwire has compiled a jolly list for a Wednesday afternoon: the top ten dirtiest male writers. It’s not for the faint-hearted, not least because the Marquis de Sade and John Wilmot, earl of Rochester, have not made the cut. Here is the list, with my thoughts on the selection and links to relevant reviews and articles. 10). Philip Roth. I’m too delicate to contemplate Portnoy’s Complaint and The Humbling at once. 9). William Shakespeare. I recall this line in Brett Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction: ‘You’d be on your back if you knew’. If so it’s pinched from Shakespeare: ‘Thou wilt fall backwards when thou hast more wit.

Here is a selection of literary comment and debate from around the world. Writing in the Observer, Paul Theroux describes his life as a perpetual alien. It is the happy, often pompous delusion of the alien that he or she is a witness to an era of significant change. I understand this as a necessary conceit, a survival skill that helps to make the stranger watchful. I lived in England for 18 years, as a pure spectator, from the end of 1971 until the beginning of 1990. I was just an onlooker, gaping at public events that did not involve me. I was a taxpayer, but couldn't vote; a house owner, but still needed an entry visa; and for quite a while I had to carry an alien identity card. Having lived for six years in Africa and three in Singapore, I knew how to be an alien.

The Thick of It: The Missing DoSAC Files is a part-accompaniment part-spin-off book to the TV series created by Armando Iannucci. It's written and compiled by the same team behind the BBC series, so it is perfectly in-keeping with the show, without the air of trying-too-hard emulation that many tie-in books have. The character voices hit the same uncomfortable recognition buttons as the television series; Nicola Murray's overuse of exclamation marks being particularly familiar to anyone who has ever received a message from an overexcited mother who has finally worked out how to use the email. The book centres on Malcolm Tucker, the conceit being that the Head of Communications has lost his file on the Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship.

'I’m not writing songs anymore; they’re writing me.’ Plagued by music in her head that arrived unbidden, drowning out conversation, Kristin Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder just as psychologists stopped calling it ‘manic depression’. Always on the lookout for a mentally ill musician to acclaim as a genius, the British music press adopted Hersh and her band Throwing Muses in the late 1980s even as their native America remained indifferent. Paradoxical Undressing (Atlantic Books, £18.99) is a memoir based on the diary Hersh kept as a teenager in the mid-Eighties, and tells a good story: precociously bright girl attempts suicide, lands a record deal and finds herself pregnant, all within the space of a year.

Andrew Petrie has written the Bookend column for this week's magazine. Here it is an exclusive for readers of this blog. ‘I’m not writing songs anymore; they’re writing me.’ Plagued by music in her head that arrived unbidden, drowning out conversation, Kristin Hersh was diagnosed with bipolar disorder just as psychologists stopped calling it ‘manic depression’. Always on the lookout for a mentally ill musician to acclaim as a genius, the British music press adopted Hersh and her band Throwing Muses in the late 1980s even as their native America remained indifferent.

It is strange that, in an age when so few people read books, literary prizes have taken on such significance. This week, with considerable pomp, the Man Booker Foundation announced a new award in honour of the late Beryl Bainbridge, the novelist and Spectator contributor. At last, Beryl the ‘Booker Bridesmaid’ – so-called because she was shortlisted for the award more than any other writer without ever winning it – could become Beryl ‘the Booker bride.' This new 'Best of Beryl' prize, to be chosen by the public, means she can rest in peace. Isn't it silly? Bainbridge deserves a posthumous prize, of course: she was a brilliant writer, arguably the best of her generation, and, I'm told, a wonderful woman.

Writers seldom cause revolutions, especially novelists. Even the greatest and most visionary political authors – Solzhenitsyn, Orwell and Hugo – were bound to the task of reflecting a society in turmoil. But, in doing so, fiction can have a more profound impact than the frenzied efforts of photographers and news editors to explain violent political movement. Disparate sweeps of disaffection can take clear form in the mind of a skilled novelist, and change can be presented beyond the myopia of newsreel. Ben Macintyre has found the novel that charts the character of the Egyptian dissenters. The Yacoubian Building was written by Alaa Al Aswany, a Cairo dentist, in 2002. It is a story of power, pessimism and resentment, and how they build towards violence.

Increasingly, this is an age of revolution. Disaffection has even reached England’s green and apathetic land. Libraries are to close and campaign groups have formed online around books blogs and community forums. Slogans are shouted, ministers harangued and the Culture Select Committee petitioned – all to no immediate avail. The dissenters are not above direct action, albeit confined to the sleepily donnish variety of protest. A wave of sit-ins, or read-ins as they are termed, was coordinated last Saturday and I went to watch the tenor of these demonstrations. First impressions of New Cross Library are thwarted by the pervasive must. The air is coarse: dehydrated by the aggressive central heating, straining with a pained hum.

After several breathless promo ads, Faulks on Fiction finally got under way this weekend. The four-part series aims (as Faulks explains during a fetching walk-and-talk shot on the Millennium Bridge) to weaken the mystique of authors; Faulks' emphasis is on characters. The first programme occupied itself with 'the hero' in English fiction, or, more accurately, narrated the decline of swashbuckling brawn from Robinson Crusoe to John Self. With the rise of postmodernism, so the argument goes, the literary hero breathed his last. Inevitably, Faulks has to paint with a pre-school sized brush.

Marcus Berkmann has written the Bookends column in this week's issue of the Spectator. Here it is as an exclusive for the books blog. An awful lot of books are being published these days about the English language. David Crystal has a new one out every few weeks, and John Sutherland probably has half a dozen on the go. The Language Wars is Henry Hitchings’s third and unlikely to be his last. Previous books have been described as ‘chewy and edible’ and ‘a goldmine of pleasures’, which leads you to expect something discursive, entertaining and not particularly substantial, but Hitchings (in real life the Evening Standard’s drama critic) has a serious, even polemical purpose here.