Culture

Though the indefatigable Gyles Brandreth met and interviewed Prince Philip over a 40-year period, His Royal Highness managed to give very little away. ‘He would just look at me balefully and say nothing,’ Brandreth writes. Wondering what Prince Philip’s philosophy of life might be, ‘I didn’t get very far’. When asked about his childhood,‘he brushed away the subject’. Prince Philip’s attitude to parenthood was a flat: ‘We did our best.’ His opinion of the Queen Mother: ‘He would not be drawn.’ His summing up of the consort’s existence: ‘I tried to find useful things to do. I did my best’ — e.g. by introducing a footman training programme or building a log cabin at Sandringham.

Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in its most authentic sense was surely the defining quality of the painter John Craxton, and it flavours this lively and richly coloured account of his life. Ian Collins only met the elderly Craxton — by now sporting the moustaches, shepherd’s stick and general demeanour of a Cretan chieftain — in the last decade of his life (he lived to 88), and was immediately seduced by his joie de vivre and his fund of recondite knowledge, stories and jokes, and drawn into Craxton’s charmed circle.

After falling in love with Italy as a young woman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri broke with English and began writing in Italian. Her new novel — a slim and bewitching tale of a woman at her midpoint — she wrote first in Italian and has since translated. The story is told in a series of vignettes, the lengthiest six or so pages. Each is titled with the setting — in the office, at the register, on the street — and paints an exquisite picture of a single soul moving thoughtfully about her city. ‘I don’t share my life with anyone,’ says that soul early on. She lives alone in a spartan apartment, and with only herself to worry about she never fills the fridge.

This might seem an odd confession, but the work of Roberto Bolaño gives me very good bad dreams. When I first read his epic masterpiece 2666 I had three nights of fractured nightmares. This happened with every other book as well — usually dreams about reading a book by Roberto Bolaño, except the words melt and shift and are land mines or tripwires on the page. It happened again with Cowboy Graves: 3.08 a.m., and I’m re-reading the central piece, convinced there is a character and a scene in it that doesn’t exist. In an eloquent afterword, Juan Ródenas gives a plausible reason for Bolaño’s seeming capacity to hack the subconscious.

San Francisco is a fantastic place... it’s terribly sunny... I am having a splendid hedonistic time here... I find myself continually going to marvellous orgies where I meet unbelievably sexy people... I dropped acid for Christmas Day... had sex for SIX HOURS... Then to New York, which I’ve never enjoyed so much... Some of the people I met introduced me to cocaine (one of the people was a singer for a pop group called Looking Glass), and that is a fine drug... Life is such fun here... I had an extraordinary three-way with two guys I met in a bar... I am really pretty happy... I’ve been doing a lot of nice acid this year... It was absolutely brilliant — a five-way on my 64th birthday. Age is apparently exactly the same as youth...

I could never muster much enthusiasm for the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. His work, on the early universe and the nature of spacetime, was Nobel-worthy, but those of us outside his narrow community were horribly short-changed. His 1988 global bestseller A Brief History of Time was incomprehensible, not because it was difficult but because it was bad. Nobody, naturally, wanted to ascribe Hawking’s popular success to his rare form of motor neurone disease, Hawking least of all. He afforded us no room for horror or, God forbid, pity. In 1990, asked a dumb question about how his condition might have shaped his work (because people who suffer ruinous, debilitating illnesses acquire compensating superpowers, right?