Culture

The 1960s brought in the Beatles, drugs, long hair, hippy communes, eastern gurus and the alternative culture, so called. Against all this was the ‘straight’ world whose denizens were short-haired Frank Sinatra fans in suits. The two types seemed quite different from each other, but one thing they had in common was their obsession with fanatastical notions. The alternatives were into UFOs, ley lines, psychic healing and whatnot, while the straights believed in flying to the moon and founding colonies or military bases in outer space. And since the men in suits had the power and the money, they were in a position to realise their fantasies. In 1969 an American rocket deposited two men on the moon’s surface.

As Hitchcock knew, the best thrillers use the very simplest materials to achieve their sinister purpose of enthralling and terrifying their audience. Nicci French’s previous novels have shown an impressive ability to dramatise the darkest concerns of her readers. Her latest book taps into the universal fear of parents: what do you do when your child goes missing? It sounds a simple formula, and it is. But getting it right is extraordinarily difficult. Saturday 18 December is Nina Landry’s 40th birthday. She and her children — 15- year-old Charlotte and 12-year-old Jackson — are off to Florida for Christmas with Nina’s boyfriend. The Landrys live on Sandling Island off the Essex coast.

This week sees the centenary of the birth in York of W. H. Auden. All over the world this season, Audenites should at 1755 hours precisely prepare a very cold, very dry Martini and at 1800 hours, six o’clock, again precisely, down it in praise and memory of a giant of English letters. Vital to be meticulous about the hour. As he said of himself in an autobiographical sketch: So obsessive a ritualista pleasant surprisemakes him cross.Without a watchhe would never know whento feel hungry or horny. Like many Oxford undergraduates of my generation (he was Professor of Poetry when I went up), I knew Auden slightly and dined with him a few times. He had aged prematurely, become repetitive and, away from the page, fairly boring.

The Paris Review came into being in 1953, when a group of young Americans living in Paris, among them George Plimpton and William Styron, decided to start a literary magazine. Their intention was to get away from the academic factionalism that then prevailed in literary journals, and simply publish good writing, whether fiction, poetry or plays. In addition, the group came up with an ingenious format — the Q&A — whereby authors would have the chance to discuss the process of writing with a knowledgeable and broadly sympathetic interviewer. Undoubtedly, the format’s appeal was enhanced by the fact that the Paris Review was cash-strapped. Displaying a financial canniness that is rare among literary types, Plimpton and Co.

Natasha Cooper’s heroine, Trish Maguire, is a barrister who subverts the stereotypes, an outsider whose troubled background sometimes gives her more in common with clients than colleagues. At the start of A Greater Evil (Simon & Schuster, £17.99), the latest novel in the series, Trish’s private life is on a relatively even keel. At work, her attention is on a complex insurance case involving the Arrow, an elegant addition to the City’s skyline which is developing some unexpected cracks. The opposing team includes a heavily pregnant friend, Cecilia. Then Cecilia is brutally attacked in the studio of her sculptor husband Sam. Her baby is born prematurely as she dies. Sam, who has a history of violence, is the police’s prime suspect.

If you are English and love the poetry of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz, you probably have Al Alvarez to thank, directly or indirectly. The unostentatiously brilliant, cosmopolitan reviews Alvarez contributed to the Observer over a decade from the mid- 1950s, together with his taste-changing 1962 anthology The New Poetry and his editorship of a Penguin series of modern European poetry in translation, made him at least as important to poetry-readers as Kenneth Tynan was to theatre-goers. Latterly, most of his work has appeared in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books (where he was one of the founding contributors), but in the 1950s and 1960s he was everywhere, including on radio programmes like The Critics.

France discovered the Arab world with Napoleon’s ill-fated expedition to Egypt in 1798. If David Pryce-Jones is to be believed, this event marked the beginning of two centuries of pernicious Arabophilia and anti-Semitism, leading successive French governments to support unpleasant Middle Eastern despots and turn a blind eye to Islamic terrorism. Like most large generalisations, this one requires a fair amount of tendentious selection to support it. Pryce-Jones draws his examples from a wide field. The Dreyfus affair, the exclusion of Jews from the higher reaches of the pre-war diplomatic service, the racial policies of Vichy France, the granting of asylum to the Mufti of Jerusalem and later to Khomeini and Arafat, are all pressed into service.

Q: How to write imaginatively about the developing world? The old Naipaul-style methods of tragicomic ironising seem to be on the way out. Magic realism, where the butterfly clouds float reliably over the parched savannah, is not what it was. On the other hand, allegory-cum-fable — a tradition that extends at least as far back as J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) — is still going strong. Joining it on the rails is what might be called the documentary approach, in which great stretches of past, post- colonial time are populated by characters who, whatever their individual quirks, are above all representative of the historical currents flowing around them.

In 1907 the Nobel Prize for Literature was for the first time awarded to an English-language writer: Kipling. It wasn’t even then a choice that went down well with those whose opinions counted. ‘The denizens of literary London,’ David Gilmour remarked in The Last Recessional, ‘were aghast that the prize should have gone to Kipling while Swinburne, Meredith and Hardy were still alive. It was a case, said one of them, of neglecting the goldsmiths and exalting the literary blacksmith.’ This was a curious judgment, for, whatever else may be said about Kipling, he was, in the short stories especially, the most careful and cunning craftsman. But by 1907 the youthful virtuosity which had so impressed Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James had staled.