Culture

We've just uploaded Lloyd Evans's Web Exclusive report on the latest Spectator / Intelligence Squared event - Howard Jacobsen discussing his novel 'The Act of Love' with Peter Florence.  You can read it here.

Gabriel García Márquez, by Gerald Martin In July 1965, or so the story goes, a Colombian writer in early middle age, living in Mexico City, decided to take his wife and two young sons on a short and much needed holiday to Acapulco. He had had some small successes, and was respected in the small world of Latin American letters. Still, money was tight and imaginative writing had to be supplemented with income from other sources — journalism, the writing of advertising copy. He had driven some way on the winding road to Acapulco when suddenly, ‘from nowhere’ he afterwards said, a sentence came into his head: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember the day his father took him to discover the ice.

The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes Just what some- one who studied science should be called was mooted at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. ‘Formerly the “learned” embraced in their wide grasp all the branches of the tree of knowledge, mathematicians as well as philologers, physical as well as antiquarian speculators,’ reported the geologist William Whewell. ‘But these days are past.’ The meeting was chaired by Coleridge, who vetoed the use of ‘philosopher’; ‘savants’ was instantly rejected as too French. But ‘some ingenious gentlemen’ (including Whewell himself) proposed ‘that, by analogy with “artist”, they might form “scientist” ’.

We’ve just posted up Lloyd Evans’s review of Thomas Friedman’s talk at Intelligence Squared last night on his new book, Hot, Flat and Crowded. Why the world needs a green revolution and how we can renew our global future. It is well worth reading.

Henry: Virtuous Prince, by David Starkey Among the glories of Flanders and Swann is a long, erudite and silly shaggy-dog story about the Tudor theatre. It culminates in the appearance as from nowhere of a score for the tune known as ‘Greensleeves’ — or ‘Greenfleeves’ as Flanders and Swann have it. Someone wonders aloud who composed it, and a voice from the back of the auditorium booms: ‘We did.’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re Henry the Eighth, we are.’ David Starkey’s new book adds an extra valency to this joke. It wasn’t just his royal status that called for the plural pronoun; there were, he argues, two Henry VIIIs.

Cartoons and Coronets: The Genius of Osbert Lancaster, introduced and selected by James Knox It is a cliché of book-reviewing to write, of a humorous book, ‘I began reading it on a train. It made me laugh out loud several times, to my embarrassment in the crowded carriage.’ Well, it happened to me recently with In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, edited by Charlotte Mosley. What started me off were Leigh Fermor’s variations on William Blake’s couplet: A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all Heaven in a rage. Leigh Fermor’s first conceit made me cackle: Blackbirds fluttering from a pie Cause four-and-twenty cheers on high. His next: When a pig wanders from its pound The angels call for drinks all round.