David Blackburn

It is Budget Day. Prepare for another barrage of “messages” about the virtues or perils, depending on your point of view, of ‘austerity’. From where has this ubiquitous term come? And should it apply to our times? Dot Wordsworth, our language columnist, has some answers: ‘If we are invited to think we are experiencing austerity, despite the heaps of cheap clothes in Primark or expensive food in Waitrose, then it is Mr Cameron’s doing. In April 2009, not so long ago, at the Conservative spring conference (that needless enterprise) he promised an ‘age of austerity’.

Had he not died 12 years ago, Douglas Adams would have been 61 yesterday. Google produced a doodle in his memory, and the Guardian published an interesting piece which declared that Adams remains the king of comedy SF, before going on to argue that he was unique, pretty much the only writer in that genre. Take a bow Mr Adams; you’re top of a league of one. But, in a way, Adams was, or very nearly was, unique. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels are comedies of ideas flavoured with lashings of silliness: the restaurant at the end of the universe and Marvin the Paranoid Android, a robot beset by depression because he never uses his planet-sized brain – how gloriously silly and how very clever. How unique, almost.

David Cameron is not for lurching. No lurch to the right, he says. The word ‘lurch’ underscores commentary on the government’s difficulties; but what does it actually mean? As so often in these matters, Dot Wordsworth, our language correspondent, has a few erudite suggestions, one of which is this: ‘Lurching is a nicely pejorative word. A lurch could only be welcome accidentally. The word suddenly popped up in the 19th century. No one is known to have used it earlier than Byron in 1819, in Don Juan, where he contrives a Byronic rhyme: ‘A mind diseased no remedy can physic/ (Here the ship gave a lurch, and he grew sea-sick.’)’ The quotation is apt because the word’s origins are believed to be nautical.

Why can’t politicians resist the temptation to comment? Hilary Mantel’s piece in the LRB is about as political as the pasta I was eating when David Cameron stopped darkening Indian doors for a moment to make what political strategists and pundits term “an intervention” on the matter. What possessed him (and Ed Miliband, who followed him into the mad breach)? The question is best answered, I think, by Peter Oborne in The Rise of Political Lying and much of his other writing. Oborne describes how political reality has changed. There was a time, at least in theory, when politics was determined by arguments over a verifiable truth; but this has been replaced by a competition of narratives. The era of ‘truth’ might be defined simply as: which ideas work.

Cricket glorifies some cheats. W.G. Grace often batted on after being clean bowled; such was the public demand to watch him. Douglas Jardine’s bodyline tactics revolutionised fast bowling: eventually making it acceptable to target the batsman rather than the wicket. Fielders “work” the ball. Batsmen stand their ground when convention asks them to walk. Cheating is part of cricket. But match fixing? The culprits live forever in infamy, and deservedly so. The cricketing authorities (the ICC) believed that match fixing had died ten years ago; but the News of the World’s sting on the Pakistan team in 2010 demolished those hopes. The sting suggested that the problem was deep. Rumours abounded around the globe.

This blog post is not going to say anything original. You’ll have read it all before. Its sole purpose is to convince you that P.G. Wodehouse is the master so everyone else should give up, particularly the people who’ve tried to adapt Blandings for the telly. Blandings on TV is not all that bad. I’ve laughed at the gentler moments of farce. Some of the dialogue sparkles. The performances are good-ish. The setting has some charm. But I’m inclined to agree with everyone else who has spent brain power on it: the screen can't do Wodehouse. My father once told me that he kept copies of The Code of the Woosters and Right Ho, Jeeves in his desk at work. He referred to them, he said, whenever he suspected that his prose had grown pallid.

The confirmation that bones found beneath a Leicester car park are ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ those of Richard III has launched a deluge of familiar puns. ‘A hearse! A hearse! My kingdom for a hearse!’ say numerous wags on Twitter. I wonder if Richard III would be remembered so widely today were it not for Shakespeare. The character of the play, who speaks some of the most famous lines in English, is descended from the portrait drawn by Sir Thomas More in an uncompleted history written at various points throughout the 1510s. Many historians argue that More wrote the book to please the Tudors.

Hilary Mantel has won the Costa Book Award of the Year for Bring up the Bodies. It saw off contenders: Maggot Moon by Sally Gardner (the children’s book winner), The Innocents by Francesca Segal (the first novel award), The Overhaul by Kathleen Jamie (the poetry prize) and Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary and Bryan Talbot (winner of the best biography award, and the first graphic work to win a Costa prize). Mantel collected the prize fund of £30,000. Mantel’s win means that she has also secured a ‘literary treble’: Bring Up the Bodies has won the Booker Prize, the Costa Novel Award and Costa Book of the Year. This achievement is worthy of this extraordinary book.

If you happen to be passing through King’s Cross and can spare 10 minutes, drop by the British Library to see Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction, a small but perfectly formed exhibition about crime writing.