Mark Mason

There aren’t many jobs that allow a nice middle-class Jewish boy to say ‘fuck’ in front of his parents. But Jonathon Green found one: compiling slang dictionaries. This memoir of a life spent exploring the grubby margins of the English language reveals plenty about both that language and Green himself. When a man loves reading so much that he does it even while brushing his teeth, material won’t be lacking. The ‘parents’ line is Green’s stock reply to the ‘why did you choose your job’ question. But the analysis goes deeper. ‘That Jew thing’, as he calls it, features heavily.

Fans of Count Arthur Strong (and yes I know he’s so Marmite you could spread him on a cheese sandwich) love the failed performer because he does what we all dream of: ranting at others to cover our own mistakes. At the same time he reminds us what a fool this makes one look, so as well as being an entertainer he’s a cautionary tale. The warning is now available in book form, Through It All I’ve Always Laughed. If you’re unfamiliar with the Count’s work you should probably sample him on radio or television first. Converts, however, will relish the revelations about what made Strong the man, the legend, the sole proprietor of the Doncaster Academy of Performance he is.

No one watches Antiques Roadshow for the antiques. Instead we’re hanging on the punter’s reaction to his three-grand valuation. ‘It was very precious to Aunt Mabel; we’d never dream of selling it,’ says the mouth. ‘Fortnight in Barbados,’ say the eyes. The Antiques Magpie by the Roadshow’s Marc Allum exhibits the same preference for stories over objects. Allum tells us that ‘drop-dead gorgeous’ comes from Victorian dresses (as in Winterhalter’s painting above) whose green dye contained arsenic, and that French forks have their crests on the back because they were laid face down on the table.

I’ve been trying to think of something – anything – in recent years that has had a bigger effect on the working day of the average writer than Twitter. And I can’t. Writing, for just about everyone who does it professionally, is the act of minimising your number of excuses for not writing. Nigel Farndale’s recent piece in the magazine addressed the problem of views; Julian Barnes, for instance, can only work if he’s facing the blank wall of his study. It reminded me of David Niven, who saw a plane flying over as ‘a bonanza – I’ll watch that for hours’. Eventually he had to retreat to a chair facing into the right-angle of a hedge in his garden: ‘I can’t even see the sky.

Normally you come to the Speccie Books blog, brainy bunch that you are, for high-minded literary comment. But this is August. Holiday month. A time when you simply can’t be fagged with the latest trends in Proustian scholarship. The only French words you want to hear at the moment are ‘Ambre Solaire’. What you really want from the blog right now is an utterly mind-blowing book-based trick which will amaze the friends you’re sharing that Dorset holiday cottage with. A genuinely astonishing piece of mentalism that’ll have them scratching their heads like Horrid Henry in front of the nit nurse. Well, here it comes. Get your friend to choose any two of the books in the cottage (or house, or flat, or wherever you happen to be at the time.

‘Would you mind if I asked what your book is?’ She was in her late-thirties, with dark hair and a serious demeanour. Her reply to my question took a few seconds to appear, the short period in which a woman assesses whether the man sitting opposite her in a not-very-busy Tube carriage in the middle of the afternoon is or is not a weirdo. ‘Er … why?’ The words revealed a Spanish accent. They were delivered perfectly politely. ‘It’s just that I haven’t seen a book covered like that in ages.’ Since I was at school, in fact. The brown paper, which Ms Jubilee Line had folded into exquisite hospital corners and sellotaped neatly, was thick enough to completely obscure title, author’s name, cover illustration, the lot.

This is a book about Rwanda. It’s a book about cycling. But it’s not, in the end, a book about Rwandan cycling. Well, it is. Tim Lewis gives us the story of Adrien Niyonshuti’s attempts to qualify for the 2012 Olympics under the tutelage of American cycling legend Jock Boyer. Adrien and his teammates are desperate to put Rwanda on the world map for something other than the 1994 genocide. But while the tale has its dramatic moments, it never really bursts into life. It’s too messy for that; as Lewis himself says, ‘situations in Africa are rarely, if ever, neat’. For instance, one of the cyclists refuses to train, being too busy pirating videos for the profitable film showings he organises.

Senility is a cunning mistress. She’s always finding new ways to twist your melon, man. The latest trick she’s playing on me is Western House Syndrome. I should point out before we go any further that I’m not talking about real senility. Still only in my early forties, I have just as strong a grip on reality as any man of that age with a young child stealing more of his sleep than he feels comfortable with. But even a relative whippersnapper like me knows the gentle failings of memory which get that little bit more noticeable every year. They’re only at the ‘have I put sugar in that tea?’ level, but still, they can make life tricky.

We were never going to get ‘come to the party’ or ‘a hundred and ten per cent’ from The Authors XI by The Authors Cricket Club, with a foreword by Sebastian Faulks (Bloomsbury, £16.99). Instead there’s ‘Passchendaeleian’ and ‘Ballardian’ (of pitches), ‘burst-sofa torsos’ (of themselves) and the observation that the French revolutionaries’ cry of ‘Aux armes!’ sounds uncannily like ‘howzat?!’ The team of cricketing writers tackle a chapter each, combining match reports from their 2012 season with reflections on different aspects of the game (class, broadcasting, kit, youth and so on).

‘Words and cricket,’ wrote Beryl Bainbridge, ‘seem to go together.’ Why should this be? The Ashes series starting next week might not be the most eagerly anticipated of recent times, due mainly to the Aussies having developed a taste for self-destruction rivalling that of Frank Spencer. But still the words come. Broadsheets and blogs alike are bubbling with pieces about the urn. There are new books too, such as Simon Hughes’s Cricket’s Greatest Rivalry: A History of the Ashes in 10 Matches. It’s just as entertaining and informative as the ex-Middlesex bowler’s previous books, displaying his customary eye for the memorable detail.

There I was, slowly and not ungrumpily coming to terms with the fact that there weren’t going to be any more decent books about the Apollo missions. Only 12 men ever walked on the Moon, and the ones that were interested in writing autobiographies had already done so. There’d been the brilliant one-volume history of the whole project (Andrew Chaikin’s A Man on the Moon), and the personal memoir of what it meant to an ordinary kid growing up at the time (Andrew Smith’s Moondust). There were the big glossy coffee-table jobs showing every crater, and Norman Mailer’s over-written but still revealing account of being at Houston and Cape Kennedy, A Fire on the Moon. What was there possibly left to write?