Culture

It is more than 30 years since Mark Amory declared biography dead, when he published his edition of Evelyn Waugh’s letters. Despite the best efforts of Victoria Glendinning (notably on Trollope) and Claire Tomalin (on Pepys and many others) there has been no grand critical resurrection since, until this year and the announcement of the shortlist for the Costa Awards. Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne has received the recognition of which Spectator reviewers Philip Hensher and David Sexton believed it worthy.

The Paris Review has surpassed itself yet again, with a brief memoir by photographer Paul McDonough. His photos and writing depict metropolitan life as it is predominantly lived: in a constant motion of coming and going. For McDonough, there is no such thing as still life. The actors in a city’s exterior space may or may not be aware that they are the centre of attention; but they are never sedentary. This realisation affected his art: "What turned me away from painting was a realization that the streets and parks of Boston provided me with subject matter that I could not conjure up in my studio. At that point, a blank canvas drew nothing but a blank stare.

When they found Hans Blix dead, his throat was slit and his tongue was pulled through the hole, an arrangement apparently known as a ‘Cuban necktie’. William Gibson did not do the deed – it was the work of an overenthusiastic hit man – and nor is he the person who commissioned the hit; their identity remains unclear. But he can, with confidence, be held directly responsible. After all, it happens in one of his novels. Hans Rutger Blix, ‘naturalised citizen of Costa Rica’, is a character in Virtual Light (1993); his death is punishment for losing the book’s macguffin, a rather special pair of dark glasses.

‘Oh my human brothers let me tell you how it happened,’ begs SS officer Max Aue, the narrator at the beginning of Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust novel The Kindly Ones. It is a book about the nature of evil. Simply memorialising the Holocaust, Littell says, always through the mouth of Aue, has relegated the killers to sub-human status. Littell challenges the reader to empathise with the Nazis, because Europe’s most grotesque trauma was perpetrated by the most civilised of men. Aue is strikingly human. If nothing else he is a study in pretentiousness, with an adolescent impulse to impress.

Every Friday, on the Spectator Book Blog, we'll be publishing the latest Bookends column from the magazine. For those who haven't come across the column before, it's a 250-word review of a recent book – somewhat shorter than the rest of the reviews in the print edition – and well-suited to the blog format. Anyway, here's the latest: Flesh and blood Flesh. Lots of flesh. That was the simple promise of a Hammer horror film. In this collection of classic Hammer posters (The Art of Hammer by Marcus Hearn, Titan, £24.99) we have cleavages, writhing torsos and shining thighs aplenty. But it’s not just that kind of flesh.

It hardly feels like 50 years ago that Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly tripped her way into cinematic folklore on her journey to become a timeless icon. In her little Givenchy black dress and long cigarette holder, Holly has endured dramatically and improbably. But then, the Holly Golightly’s of this world are improbable girls to begin with.

I haven’t read Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, for lack of opportunity rather than lack of will. However, the loud critical response has not escaped me. How could it? The Corrections and Freedom have both been crowned with the thorns of being a ‘Great American Novel’; and he is the celebrated author of the moment, gracing the cover of Time Magazine and making regular though unseen appearances in the latest series of Gossip Girl no less. Critics are unanimous: Freedom is ‘very good in parts’ – a green-eyed euphemism for 'bloody brilliant'. But when it comes to Franzen himself, the man divides the sexes in America, vehemently so.

Ageing roué Michel Houellebecq, the Serge Gainsbourg of the literary world, has won France’s most prestigious literary prize for his latest novel, La Carte et le Territoire (The Map and the Territory). Not before time, his supporters will say. But, then again, Houellebecq has long polarised opinion, and Les Cartes et le Territoire - featuring a foul-smelling, alcoholic, atrociously dressed writer called Michel Houellebecq, who is murdered in brutal fashion - promises to entrench that reputation. He was interviewed by the Paris Review last month.

There are few heretics before the Church of Ian McEwan, but Thomas Jones’ uses his review of Solar in the London Review of Books to make two points. Monomania is a feature of English writing – think motherhood to Mrs Bennett, hypochondria to Mr Wodehouse or climate change to James Delingpole. McEwan is unusual in that many of his protagonists are monomaniacs. Jones argues that this robs them of their humanity. Henry Perowne, the neurosurgeon in Saturday, is an extreme example. He perceives everything from the perspective of his profession.