Culture

It takes pluck to write about the historical Jesus, not just because doing so always stirs the wrath of hot-headed Christians but because there is not a single ‘fact’ relating to Jesus’s life that cannot be fiercely disputed according to any objective interpretation of the available evidence. Take, for instance, the supposed year of his birth. In 525 Pope John I issued a papal bull decreeing that this event had taken place in 1 AD. Matthew, however, stated in his Gospel that Jesus was born during the reign of Herod the Great who is known to have died in 4 BC.

The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968) by Quintin Hogg The Devil’s Own Song and Other Verses (1968)by Quintin Hogg Yes, that Quintin Hogg, Lord Hailsham of Woolsack fame. ‘Quite suddenly, during the summer of 1940, my personal and emotional situation was such that I felt an irresistible urge to write short lyrics,’ he says in the introduction. ‘I cannot explain this. I had not then, and have not now, any swollen-headed ideas about my quality as a poet ... Somewhere about 1963, whatever little rill of inspiration I had, dried up.

A selection from Keeping My Words: An Anthology from Cradle to Grave by Magnus Magnusson (Hodder & Stoughton, £6.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0340862645) What though his head be empty, provided his commonplace book be full?Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), A Tale of a Tub Lord knows what incommunicable small terrors infants go through, unknown to all. We disregard them, we say they forget, because they have not the words to make us remember … By the time they learn to speak they have forgotten the details of their complaints, and so we never know. They forget so quickly, we say, because we cannot contemplate the fact that they never forget.Margaret Drabble (b. 1939), The Mill- stone, 1965 I am fond of children (except boys).

Would-be artists clinging to the belief that they are in possession of strangely unrecognised genius draw comfort from the thought of Van Gogh. For struggling writers, the biography of Herman Melville is almost equally potent. In some ways, indeed, it is even more poignant, for it is one of early success; early glamour, after the publication of Typee in 1846, as ‘the man who lived among cannibals’; abundant early promise that, in the eyes of contemporaries, merely fizzled out. He wrote published fiction for only 12 years of his 72 years, to increasingly bad reviews and poor sales: when he died, his last work, Billy Budd: Foretopman, was an unpublished manuscript. His last novel was published in 1857, when he was only 38, and the rest of his life is sad reading.

A few years back I had an argument with Ned Sherrin (now, but not then, a friend), which I have to say he won. Reviewing the first edition of his Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations — now reissued in a third edition — I complained that there were too many old chestnuts in it. Varying the metaphor, I wrote, ‘As a child, I would politely decline the gobstopper that three other kids had already sucked.’ Ned rightly retorted that it is precisely for familiar quotations, half-forgotten, that people often turn to dics of quots. (‘To be or ...’ — how does it go?). I had a more serious reservation about the book.

Answers to Cancer (1962)by William Gaddis The William Gaddis canon is limited to five novels (The Recognitions, J. R., Carpenter’s Gothic, A Frolic of his Own and Agapé Agape), now recognised to be among the most distinguished in American literature. His career got off to a bad start, though. His first novel The Recognitions (1955) was either ignored or dismissed as sub-Joycean stuff (Gaddis commented, ‘I recall a most ingenious piece in a Wisconsin quarterly some years ago in which The Recognitions’ debt to Ulysses was established in such minute detail I was doubtful of my own firm recollection of never having read Ulysses.