David Blackburn

When it comes to national stereotypes, the modern mind remains thoroughly medieval. The Death of King Arthur, which Simon Armitage has translated from Middle English, contains two insults that sound down the centuries. An enraged Frenchman says, ‘These Britons were always blusterers and braggarts. Lo, how he swaggers in his shining suit/ As if to brutalise us all with the bright sword he brandishes. But his bark is all boast, that boy who stands there.’ To which King Arthur later retorts: ‘Our Frenchmen are enfeebled, I should have guessed this would follow,/ For these folk are foreigners in these far-flung fields and long for the food and fare of their liking.’ Football hooligans against cheese-eating surrender monkeys: it’s an ancient enmity.

There has been much furore this afternoon about the bookshop formerly known as Waterstone’s. The company has decided to drop the apostrophe from its name to make it more ‘versatile and practical’ according to its managing director, James Daunt. The company is also restoring its old branding. The suspicion is that apostrophes are not digital friendly. Waterstones, as we must now call it, is turning its attention to the digital world and this latest change is part of a concerted online push.

A flurry of new reviews of Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English has landed in recent days, coinciding with a new edition of the book. Kelman’s debut divides opinion. Lewis Jones thinks it ‘miraculous’. Catherine Nixey thinks (£) that it’s ‘exuberant’ but ‘miss-steps’ occasionally. And I found that a pigeon is a less than engaging narrator, even if its appearances are sparse. Reading the book made me recall the story of Kingsley Amis throwing a copy of his son Martin’s book, Money, across the room in frustration, and I wondered how the old devil might have dispatched of Kelman’s opus. All of which brings me to this piece by Alex Gallix about the death of literature.

You may remember that 2012 will see the launch of a new literary award. On Tuesday 7th February, the Coach and Horses in Soho will host our friends The Omnivore's Hatchet Job of the Year. The aim is to reinvigorate literary criticism by rewarding the 'angriest, funniest, most trenchant' book review of 2011. The aim is not to celebrate malice, but to challenge the deference that pollutes so much of Britain's cultural debate.

Last Thursday saw a major publishing event in Britain: the release of The Art of Fielding, the debut novel by American Chad Harbach. The book has been received with rapture in the States: the phrase 'Great American Novel' is being whispered and Harbach is routinely compared to Jonathan Franzen, the literati’s present infatuation. The comparison has migrated across the Atlantic. Mike Atherton, former England cricket captain and award winning sports columnist, wrote last week (£): '[Harbach] wears his learning more lightly than Franzen (although learned types will recognise all kinds of literary references) has a sharper feel for the rhythm of language on the page and is more content to let the narrative take its course.

Have you ever wondered how a Nobel Prize committee works? If so, then look no further than Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström, who has disinterred the 1961 literature panel’s minutes, the Guardian reports. There is little mystery: the judges convene to discuss nominees just as any other prize panel would, although with perhaps more self-regard than is customary. In 1961, for instance, the judges rejected Robert Frost and E.M. Forster for being too old, and Lawrence Durrell for his ‘monomaniacal preoccupation with erotic complications’. Italian novelist Alberto Moravia was overlooked because his prose amounted to ‘a general monotony’. What on earth would they have made of Umberto Eco?  The same panel blocked J.R.R.

The same question arises every year: what on earth to buy my uncle for Christmas? Crisis was averted in 2011 by the admirable Mark Forsyth, whose book The Etymologicon (Icon) is a jaunty stroll through idiomatic English, guaranteed to tickle the avuncular tendency. The Etymologicon was the sale of the season, so popular that bookshops could not supply public demand. All hands were at the printing presses as emergency runs were produced; the books were then apparently hand-delivered by Icon’s staff to bookshops desperate to profit from the public's fever. Exact figures are not yet available, but it seems that more than 50,000 copies have been sold.

Tessa Hadley is an underrated contemporary novelist; perhaps that will change in time. Her latest collection of short stories, Married Love, was serialised in the New Yorker last autumn. The stories I read there were hugely enjoyable though unsparing insights into the private and often loveless lives of others. Their content confirmed my suspicion that Hadley was invoking Marie Stopes’ Married Love, the infamous and innocent account of what she thought married life ought to be, first published in 1921. It’s a provocative echo for a woman to have sounded in 2012. The vapid obsession with the scions of the Rothschilds continues. Hannah Rothschild has gone in search of her lost and lamented relative, Nica.

Devout readers of the Spectator will know Marcus Berkmann well. He is a regular book reviewer and writes a column about music that no one else listens to — he admits as much in public, and does so without a shade of embarrassment. He views the horrendous prospect of ageing in the same breezy manner. His new book, A Shed of One’s Own, regards the inevitable march of age and concludes that we mustn’t worry about it. What you’ve lost in physique (assuming you ever had it), you’ve gained immeasurably in knowledge. The key is to use that nous for the greater good. The publishers declare that Berkmann has mastered midlife without the crisis. Now there’s a promise to rejuvenate your sagging resolve in the New Year.

Alexander McCall Smith shows no sign of tiring, which will come as good or bad news depending on your view. He has numerous titles out next year. There is yet another instalment of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detection Agency: The Limpopo Agency of Private Detection will be published in hardback on March 1. No further comment is required because McCall Smith’s sleuthing formula is as famous as the Voodoo-Hoodoo. Next, the latest episodes of McCall Smith’s Corduroy Mansions experiment, A Conspiracy of Friends. This was originally an eBook, serialised on the Telegraph’s website. The plan was to revive the episodic form by which Dickens, Thackeray et al wrote. Now, the complete work has been collected into a glossy hardback book.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Museum of London’s ‘Dickens and London’ exhibition is that it Dickens hardly features. Dickens’ novels and journalism describe the scene, but the man himself is largely unseen — one of many artistic figures in the throng of booming Victorian London. The Spectator’s obituary praised Dickens’ skill in ‘softening the lines of demarcation between the different classes of English Society.’ But he was not alone in this. Robert Dowling’s ‘Breakfasting Out’ is the best example of a trend in Victorian visual art for showing working people rubbing shoulders with the well to-do in everyday life.

Library campaigners in Brent suffered a setback yesterday when the Court of Appeal decided that the local council was not in breach of the law when it closed 6 local libraries. The library campaigners lost on all counts, including on grounds of equality. The judgment also said that the burden of centrally imposed budget cuts was a determining factor: 'Given the scale of the spending reductions the council was required to make, and the information available following earlier studies, a decision that the library service should bear a share of the reduction was not, in my judgment, unlawful.

Death has made a telling visit to the literary world in the past week: Christopher Hitchens, George Whitman and Vàclav Havel have all died. The appreciation of Hitchens is fast approaching the precedents set by his targets, Princess Diana and Mother Theresa — an irresistible irony that he would certainly have appreciated. The growing beatification is the measure of journalists who aspire to Hitchens' undoubted courage and style; the greatest possible testament to the man himself. Next to the fabled Hitchens, Whitman needs further introduction. He restored the Shakespeare & Company English bookshop on the Rue Bûcherie in Paris after the war. But he was rather more than a shopkeeper.

Christopher Hitchens is dead. His reputation as a stylist, polemicist and independent thinker is such that his legacy looks certain to be secure. Here he is talking about the art of writing, and life in general.

It’s no state secret that Britain was outmanoeuvred by France at last week’s European Summit. The Old Foe triumphed and their political establishment has been, in the words of Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, farting in our general direction ever since. President Sarkozy has described David Cameron as an indignant child and the Parisian equivalent of Mervyn King has insisted that Britain’s credit rating be downgraded. We British are renowned for our stoicism, but there are limits. The Foreign Office has rebuffed the garlic-infused petulance wafting across La Manche: literary Tory minister Keith Simpson has produced his customary holiday reading list and it contains a few putdowns for our Gallic cousins.

Naguib Mahfouz would have been 100 years old last Sunday (he died in 2006 aged 94). Mahfouz was the first Arabic writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was renowned for describing, in the words of the New York Times’ obituary,  ‘the scent, colour and texture of life in the streets of his native Cairo’. Those qualities were particularly apparent in his best known work, The Cairo Trilogy — a historical trio spanning the two world wars, published in the mid ‘50s during Colonel Nasser’s rise. The trilogy is a native counterpoint to Lawrence Durrell’s Levantine Alexandria Quartet.