Culture

Claudine Van Hensbergen, an Oxford Don, has disinterred some early Georgian smut from a 1714 edition of The Works of the Earls of Rochester and Roscommon. The poems, found in a sub-section titled 'The Cabinet of Love', were added by the publisher, Edmund Curll, and are definitely not by John Wilmot, although I imagine he would have cackled along to the bawdy rhymes. Van Hensbergen told the Times (£): “To my surprise, The Cabinet turned out to be a collection of pornographic verse about dildos.

If the Observer was hoping to reignite the debate on the future of cultural criticism they couldn’t have found a soggier squib than American academic Neal Gabler’s unenlightening essay. Professional criticism, thinks Gabler, is dead. According to him, reviewers, or “cultural commissars”, used to be able to control what we “ordinary folk” read, watched and listened to “through a process close to cultural brainwashing”. Now we ignore them, consulting blogs and Twitter instead. Gabler sees this as a revolution against cultural elitism. Several things annoy me about his doomladen, US-centric prognosis: 1.

Being anonymous doesn’t immunize you from criticism, as the nameless author of O: A Presidential Novel has discovered recently. Numerous high profile reviewers have been sharpening their critical cutlery and tucking in.   Simon Schama, usually the model of bouncy good humour, was brought to a savage, Swiftian boil by 'this turkey' in the Financial Times over the weekend. And his guess at the reason for anonymity is amusing, if not a little cruel: ‘…if you’d committed something as dull as this you’d want to make sure no one found out either.’ A definite thumbs-down.   Justin Webb, in the Times, is a touch kinder.

Those who expected a novel loosely based on Barack Obama’s re-election to be a puff piece should look away now. O - A Presidential Novel is a refreshingly cynical look inside the Obama White House by an anonymous someone who claims to have seen the President live and work at close hand. Like Primary Colours with Clinton, the novel never attempts to disguise who “O” might be. And, like the West Wing, it is an irreverent and witty take on an ideal Washington world, following the ups and downs of compelling characters from across the spectrum. From lobbyists, hungry journalists to rich donors, O takes a peek at every level behind the scenes from 2011 to Election Day 2012. But there is more.

Peter Hoskin wrote the Bookends column for the latest issue of the Spectator. Here it is for readers of the blog: Did you know they once burned comic books? And in America, no less. In schoolyards. It was shortly after the end of the second world war, and legislators and parents were all shook up about what these ten-cent publications with their scenes of violence and distress were doing to the minds of their children. So on the concrete they went, in messy piles. A sprinkling of fuel, a lit match, and the fire soon caught hold. Some of the kids even cheered the flames on.

'But perhaps there was an answer, using a kind of extreme logic. My direction as a writer changed after Mary's death, and many readers thought that I became far darker. But I like to think I was much more radical, in a desperate attempt to prove that black was white, that two and two made five in the moral arithmetic of the 1960s. I was trying to construct an imaginative logic that made sense of Mary's death and would prove that the assassination of President Kennedy and he countless deaths of the Second World War had been worthwhile or even meaningful in some as yet undiscovered way. Then, perhaps, the ghosts inside my head, the old beggar under his quilt of snow, the strangled Chinese at the railway station, Kennedy and my young wife, could be laid to rest.' J. G.

Ian McEwan is in hot water with some of his lesser known fellows. A group of self-styled ‘pro-Palestinian authors’ wrote to the Guardian on Monday, and expressed their regret that McEwan will accept the biennial Jerusalem Prize. They averred that the prize, which is awarded to those who explore the theme of individual freedom in society, ‘is a cruel joke and a propaganda tool for the Israeli state.’ Some politically strident people have been cracking that cruel joke: Jorge Luis Borge, Bertrand Russell, Simone de Beauvoir, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, Eugene Ionesco, Arthur Miller, V S. Naipaul and J M. Coetzee. However, as you may have noticed, these tools of perfidious Israel’s cynicism are all dab-hands with a pen and a sheet of paper.

If you are new to Ruskin, this volume from Penguin’s ‘Great Ideas’ series is the perfect place to begin. It contains two self-contained essays, ‘The Nature of Gothic’ (from The Stones of Venice) and ‘The Work of Iron’ (a lecture he delivered at Tunbridge Wells in 1858). The two essays are short enough to be both read over in a couple of hours or so, but they cut right to the heart of Ruskin’s concerns. What do examples of good art have in common, and why should those specific qualities make them better than bad art? What is the connection between beauty and morality, and how should a well-ordered society bring them together? What does it mean to know something?

Some intriguing literary whispers did the rounds yesterday. Both the Telegraph and the Observer carried the story of Anne Robinson's imminent leap from quiz-master to literary chat-shown host. And today confirmation of such an unlikely move was confirmed by the BBC: My Life In Books, a new daily show hosted by the queen of mean is set to hit our screens with confirmed guests like the Duchess of Devonshire, P.D. James, Giles Coren and Sir Trevor McDonald.