Culture

If you tell people there was no ox or ass in the stable where Jesus was born, they sometimes become quite irate, especially if they are convinced Christians. They believe in the marvellous Christmas story, and to deny the ox and ass seems tantamount to denying the Babe of Bethlehem. Of course, the ox and ass are not in fact mentioned in the Gospels. The artists painted them in, not just because Jesus lay in a manger, but on account of the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘The ox knows its owner and the ass its master’s crib.’ Geza Vermes mentions these beasts as examples of extra-evangelical elements, along with the ‘three kings’, who are not called kings in the Gospels, but magi.

‘Those who can, write. Those who can’t, quote.’ Well, I’m sure someone has said it, although I have just looked it up in these two vast, baggy new books of quotations and it’s not there. Truth is, the great English tradition of hurling quotations at other people to show how clever you are seems to have disappeared over the past couple of generations. Instead we have books of quotations; indeed I seem to have rather a lot of them, mainly because I have a tendency to wander into bookshops after a long lunch. Surely no one buys a book of quotations when sober. They are books you want but don’t need; later on you realise you need them but shouldn’t have them.

As any good poem is always ending,The fence looks best when it first needs mending.Weathered, it hints it will fall to pieces —One day, not yet, but the chance increasesWith each nail rusting and grey plank bending.It’s not a wonder if it never ceases. In beauty’s bloom you can see time burning:A lesson learned while your guts are churning.Her soft, sweet cheek shows the clear blood flowingTowards the day when her looks are goingSolely to prove there is no returningThe way they came. There’s a trade wind blowing. We know all this yet we love forever.Build her a fence and she’ll think you’re clever.Write her a poem that’s just beginningFrom start to finish.

David Starkey’s latest book has a Gibbonesque moment. Charles I was undone by ‘his unbending adherence to principle’; ‘in contrast the only rigid thing about Charles II was his male member’. Monarchy also, alas, exhibits some of the pitfalls encountered in turning the script of a television series into a book. Breeziness cohabits with an anxious, repetitive hammering of key points; cliff-hanging intimations of what is to come are overly dramatic; the syntax is frequently sloppy. The prose is disfigured, above all, by the unrelenting use and abuse of the conjunction ‘but’ that is the hallmark of lazy journalism in the present day. Still, Starkey is a fine scholar with the ability to show us the woods, not the trees.

My apologies to the young, attractive couple in Perry Street in Greenwich Village, whose love-making I’ve been keeping a close eye on over the last year and a half. I can’t really help it. My eighth-floor flat is on exactly the same level as theirs, and their window is only 20 yards from mine across a tiny strip of garden. If it’s any consolation to the young couple, I haven’t seen much — they always drop down on the sofa out of my line of sight before the good bits. That’s the thing about New York — it’s a cheek-by-jowl place, and you can’t help getting a close-up on a lot of jowls and cheeks, upper and lower. This is the New York Alfred Hitchcock caught in Rear Window, filmed only a few streets from my flat.

If James Boswell could glance at a few recent issues of The Spectator, he would be delighted to see that the literary form he did so much to modernise is thriving. In the last month or two, biographies of Hardy, Empson, Janacek and Betjemen have impressed this magazine’s critics with their attention to detail, elegance, clear-sighted analysis and balance. So many of the skills Boswell introduced to the endeavour are still adhered to. He might, perhaps, permit himself a well-earned pat on the back. However, if he then visited his local W. H. Smith, he would lose much of that satisfaction. Very few of the lives reviewed in the literary press are ever found in the shops. A request for Empson would be met with a blank look.