The Questing-Vole

In this week’s Cease and Desist Department, it’s Grange Hill. For many tens of thousands of grown men and women worldwide, the names Tucker, Zammo and Mrs McCluskey are enough to induce an instant rapture of nostalgia: the mind’s ear fills with the sardonic, boingy guitar of the theme tune; the mind’s eye with the single sausage of the cartoon title sequence, wobbling forever on the end of its fork. For some time now, this constituency has been catered for by the existence of a non-profit website called www.grangehillfans.co.uk. Now, however, creator Phil Redmond’s Mersey TV, who took over production duties from the Beeb two years ago, are worried about the competition the site poses to its own, rather more rubbish site, called www.grangehill.com.

The presentation of this year’s Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize — an annual literary award given, in alternate years, to a volume of poetry and a novel — was an occasion for harmony and reconciliation. The party took place on the penthouse floor of Faber & Faber’s offices in Queen Square, but the winner was not a Faber poet. Rather, it was Glyn Maxwell, whose latest volume of poetry, The Nerve, is published by Picador. It was described by the judges as ‘adventurous, deft, mysterious, and intellect- ually as well as emotionally penetrating, the work of a poet who uses all the octaves on the keyboard’. This must have been a matter of quiet satisfaction for Maxwell.

Opening Sentences (name the books) 1) Aaron, Richard Ithamar (1901-1987), philo- sopher, was born on 6 November 1901 at Upper Dulais, Blaendulais, Glamorgan, the son of William Aaron (1864–1937), a draper, and his wife, Margaret Griffith (d. 1940). 2) When the woman found milk in her breasts, and other secret feminine tokens, Scaife, the constable’s man, an archdolt, was dispatched across the windswept moors and icy mountains to fetch Mr John Brigge, coroner in the wapentakes of Agbrigg and Morley. 3) So just how mega is this then? A book on English. 4) Although 1979 may not have the same histor- ical resonance as 1789, 1848 or 1917, it too marks a moment when the world was jolted by a violent reaction to the complacency of the existing order.

Even as the Christmas season draws in upon us, the academy’s best-loved post-foxhunting bloodsport — pointing out scholarly inadequacies in the new Dictionary of National Biography — continues. The latest and most eye-stretchingly savage instance comes from Nikolai Tolstoy, in a letter prominently published in the TLS. He complains that in August 2002 he was contacted for help by an in-house DNB scribe who had been commissioned to write the entry for his stepfather, the historical novelist Patrick O’Brian.