Culture

Who can we add to the roster of Great Irish Writers? Why none other than our old chum Patrick Bartholomew Ahern. It seems that Bertie's autobiography (sadly not titled Dig Outs & Other Fuck-Ups) should be found on the fiction shelves. How so? Well... The granting of tax-free status to former taoiseach Bertie Ahern for earnings from his autobiography under the artists’ exemption scheme has prompted calls for the scheme to be revised. Labour Party arts spokeswoman Mary Upton said the tax break served a worthy purpose and she would not like to see it removed, but it should be reviewed. “In the current economic climate we need to have another look at who is eligible and the financial structures around their eligibility,” she said.

Frank Auerbach (born 1931) is one of the most interesting artists working in Europe today, a philosophical painter of reality who works and re-works his pictures before he discovers something new, something worth saving. William Feaver, in this grand new monograph, calls Auerbach’s paintings ‘feats of concentration’, and stresses the hard work which goes into their construction, despite their appearance of spontaneity. Feaver has a gift for the evocative phrase: ‘Studied yet impulsive, ranging from darkness to radiance and from the declamatory to the subdued, they are keyed to an air of resolve as unguarded as joy, as involuntary as grief.’ This is a book strong on context.

Badly behaved toffs have been a gift to writers since ancient times, and in English from Chaucer to Waugh.

The results of the Spectator-Barclays Wealth short story competition have been published over at the Spectator Book Club’s discussion boards. We received more than 500 entries of the highest quality, and trying to pick the winners from a shortlist of 10 inspired bitter debate at 22 Old Queen Street. The four runners-up have been printed in full at Spectator.co.uk, but the winning entry, Black Box by Jonathan Wynne Evans, is printed in the Spectator Christmas double issue. Here’s a taster of his suspense filled story: Drifting curtains of fenland rain obscured everything from 20 yards so that, pedalling round the perimeter, the only indications of intense activity were waves of clatter from each dispersal as ground crews completed the arming of the Lancasters.

Jane Austen has become the most revered and probably the most popular of the great English novelists. Not even the vulgarisation of her novels by those who have adapted them for television has impaired the esteem in which she is held. She is not only deemed amusing, which she is, but a wonderfully fair and judicious moralist. Walter Scott praised her ‘exquisite touch, which renders ordinary commonplace  things and characters interesting, from the truth of the description and sentiment’; and this judgment is probably one with which we may all agree. Many of course go further and come close to canonising her.     There have always been a few dissenters, Charlotte Bronte for instance, and J. M.

A postal strike would have been a disaster for Van Gogh. Letters were his lifeline and consolation. Not only did he receive through the mail his regular allowance from his brother Theo but, in letter after letter in return, he poured out his thoughts and feelings, recorded his work in progress and conveyed his impressions of books, people and places. In his often solitary existence, he was an avid recipient and kept in touch with a variety of correspondents, especially when he was in the South of France during the last two years of his life. The glory must be shared, however, with Theo, in that he kept Vincent’s letters, many of which contained drawings, either appended or on the sheet itself, surrounded by his tumble of words.