Today

21 Apr 2022
The exquisite pottery of Richard Batterham

Richard Batterham died last September at the age of 85. He had worked in his pottery in the village of Durweston near Blandford Forum in Dorset for 60 years continuously. It was, in its own way, an heroic life. Batterham took an astonishingly pure, austere approach to his work. Quite simply, he undertook every part of the process of making himself. He made his own stoneware clay bodies, arguing that those who used bought-in clay missed out on the beginning of the whole process and were mistaken to think that they could just inject their artistry at a later stage. He threw his pots on an archaic kick-wheel. He did not decorate them, save by working the clay itself by incision, flutings and chatterings, to shape the piece and catch and display the glaze.

The exquisite pottery of Richard Batterham

Thursday

22 Oct 2020
A Jack Reacher travesty: The Sentinel, by Lee Child and Andrew Child, reviewed

So upsetting it would have been, for those of us who rate Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers so highly, if handing them over to another author had made no discernible difference in quality. After all, we value Child as a writer, not as a production line. So here’s the good news: it makes all the difference. The Sentinel, the 25th Jack Reacher novel, is a travesty. At 65, Child has finally carried out his long-held plan to retire. Andy Martin, his academic disciple, ended a second reverential study of his idol, With Child, by quoting Child saying to him: ‘Somebody else can do it for me... What about you?’, apparently in the hope it might really happen. Instead, Child has handed on the franchise to his younger brother, real name Andrew Grant, a much less successful thriller writer.

A Jack Reacher travesty: The Sentinel, by Lee Child and Andrew Child, reviewed

Thursday

27 Jul 2017
Down – if not out – in Paris

Virginie Despentes remains best known in this country for her 1993 debut novel, Baise-Moi, about two abused young women who set off on an orgiastically murderous road-trip round France. In 2000, she became notorious when she collaborated on the hardcore film of the book, which ran into certification problems, with Alexander Walker fulminating about the complete collapse of public decency. Despentes has now published some 15 novels altogether, celebrated in France as grunge or ‘trash’ fiction — and a polemical, erratically feminist, memoir, King Kong Theory, describing her own experience of rape and prostitution, and calling for a new aggression in female sexuality. When she was 35, Despentes (a pseudonym, referring to a quarter in Lyon where she was a sex worker) came out as a lesbian, saying it was nice not to be bothered about male approval any more and a relief not to be preoccupied with ageing — so much harder for heterosexuals, she claimed.

Down – if not out – in Paris

Thursday

15 Jan 2015
The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam

Michel Houellebecq’s sixth novel, imagining an Islamic government taking power in France in 2022, has been widely assumed to be an act of pure provocation. He is, after all, the author who faced legal trouble after having said in an interview in 2001: ‘La religion la plus con, c’est quand même l’islam.’ Soumission (Submission) was announced quite suddenly by Flammarion in December for the first week of the New Year, with an initial print run of 150,000 copies. So keen was the interest that it was pirated online before publication. It’s an event — but a literary event, it turns out. For Soumission is a fine, deeply literary work, not a prank. It’s devoted just as much to the 19th-century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (evidently its point of origin for Houellebecq) as it is to the future of Islam in Europe, offering a sustained, revealing commentary on his life and work throughout the book.

The really shocking thing about Michel Houllebecq’s Soumission — he rather likes Islam

Thursday

14 Nov 2013
One Leg Too Few may be one biography too many

It’s no joke, writing about comedians. Their work is funny, their lives are not. Rightly honouring the former while accurately relaying the disasters of the latter is a challenge few writers can well meet. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore have been extensively studied before. Harry Thompson published his excellent biography of Cook in 1997, Barbara Paskin her authorised biography of Moore the same year; Alexander Games’s joint biography Pete & Dud followed in 1999. There have been memoirs of Peter Cook by his first and second wives, Wendy and Judy, and his third wife, Lin, has edited Something Like Fire: Peter Cook Remembered. What’s to add? William Cook (no relation) has previously compiled two essential script anthologies, Tragically I Was An Only Twin: The Complete Peter Cook, and Goodbye Again: The Definitive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

One Leg Too Few may be one biography too many

Thursday

15 Aug 2013
Bitter Experience Has Taught Me, by Nicholas Lezard - review

What, really, is a literary education for? What’s the point of it? How, precisely, does it help when you’re another day older and deeper in debt? These are questions that after a while begin to present themselves with uncomfortable force and persistence to those of us who have believed from our earliest youth that if literature will not save us, it will,  surely, at least do us some small, perceptible good. What answer can we make, surveying the ruins? Nicholas Lezard is useful here, as a test case, a case tested to destruction even. Not only does he have a thoroughly literary turn of mind, he is, as he says, probably the last remaining person in the world who makes ‘what could loosely be called a living from reviewing books’.

Thursday

16 May 2013
Here and Now, by Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee - review

In love, there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. So too in the luckless genre of letters artificially exchanged for the purposes of publication. There’s been a little spate of these lately, the most interesting and unbalanced having been Public Enemies, in which Michel Houellebecq brilliantly began the exchange by telling Bernard Henri-Levy that what they had in common was that they were both a bit contemptible, a bond from which BHL tried unsuccessfully to extract himself for the rest of their collaboration. Paul Auster and J.M. Coetzee had read each other’s work for years but only met for the first time in February 2008, when they were both in their sixties. It seems it was the senior writer Coetzee who proposed this correspondence to Auster in a letter not included in the book, which begins instead with a formal discussion of the nature of friendship and its representation in literature by Coetzee, to which Auster responds much more loosely, talking eagerly about his own work and his own life in a way that Coetzee never does.

Saturday

23 Jul 2011
The revised version

The narrator of Julian Barnes’s novella has failed disastrously to understand his first love. David Sexton admires this skilful story, but finds something missingJulian Barnes once said that the only time he had ever threatened to throw a guest out of his house was not because the churl had disparaged his food or insulted his wife but because he had disputed the greatness of Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier. In the introduction to the Folio Society edition of the novel he wrote a couple of years ago, he called it ‘the most perfectly deployed example of the unreliable narrator’, and explained its method thus: ‘The storyteller isn’t up to the level of his own story; he is a bumbler obliged to convey an intrigue of operatic passion which he himself only partially understands.

The revised version

Saturday

21 May 2011
Dreaming of cowsheds

In 1999, Adam Nicolson published a very good book called Perch Hill: A New Life, about his escape from London and a break-down, after his divorce and a nasty mugging, to a farm in the Sussex Weald, close to Kipling’s house, Batemans.In 1999, Adam Nicolson published a very good book called Perch Hill: A New Life, about his escape from London and a break-down, after his divorce and a nasty mugging, to a farm in the Sussex Weald, close to Kipling’s house, Batemans.It’s one of the great descriptions of what embedding yourself deep in a patch of the countryside is like, truthful about both its solaces and its frustrations. ‘The Weald has found its Thoreau,’ said Richard Mabey. ‘This is Sussex’s answer to Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence,’ said Alain de Botton.

Dreaming of cowsheds

Saturday

18 Dec 2010
From red giant to white dwarf

Richard Cohen, who was a publishing director of Hutchinson and Hodder before moving to New York where he now teaches Creative Writing, is the author of one previous book: By the Sword: Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions (2002). This comprehensive history drew on his deep, personal knowledge of the subject, for Cohen was five times the British national sabre champion, selected for the Olympic team every time between 1972 and 1984. Its illustrations include a superb shot of the author flying through the air sideways, executing a ‘horizontal fleche’ against Dom Philip Jebb at Downside Abbey.Chasing the Sun is even more ambitious. Cohen says that when he was working in publishing he wanted to commission this book, simply because he realised that he knew so little about ‘what, above all other things, governs our lives’, but he could find no author willing to undertake such a wide-ranging account.

Saturday

20 Nov 2010
Change, decay and success

After having for so long been treated with such disdain by the French literary establishment, Michel Houellebecq has at last been embraced by it. Last week La carte et le territoire, his fifth novel, was awarded the Prix Goncourt, a distinction any of his previous novels might just as well have merited.Perhaps it has been possible to do him this belated justice because La carte et le territoire is less explicitly scandalous than its predecessors, more conventionally substantial even. If his previous novels have insolently portrayed life in our faithless, free-market world as a race between sex and death, here that race is over. There is almost no sex in this book. Houellebecq has been telling interviewers in France that he is old, that he may not have long, that this may be his last novel, that it is about ageing and the end.

Saturday

25 Sep 2010
A strict, controlling vision

Thoughtful Gardening, twice as long as the first two, beautifully produced in Germany, is a summation of the Lane Fox gardening doctrine, this time mixing more or less practical advice on particular plants — Later Clematis, Sociable Deutzias, Desirable Dahlias, the Etna Broom — with more discursive essays, recalling great gardeners, visiting gardens from Texas to Odessa, all these pieces, which are organised seasonally, being deftly linked to make an easy continuous read.Thoughtful Gardening, twice as long as the first two, beautifully produced in Germany, is a summation of the Lane Fox gardening doctrine, this time mixing more or less practical advice on particular plants — Later Clematis, Sociable Deutzias, Desirable Dahlias, the Etna Broom — with more discursive essays, recalling great gardeners, visiting gardens from Texas to Odessa, all these pieces, which are organised seasonally, being deftly linked to make an easy continuous read.

Saturday

4 Sep 2010

Saturday

8 May 2010

Saturday

27 Mar 2010
The whirlwind and the saint

Dave Eggers is the very model of the engaged writer. Since publishing his first book, the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, he has branched out into all kinds of philanthropic literary activity. His organisation, McSweeney’s, has become a major imprint, championing emerging writers. In San Francisco, he has set up a community writing project, called 826 Valencia, which now has branches in six other cities.In 2004, he created Voice of Witness, ‘a series of books that use oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world’. In one project, people talked about their experiences in Hurricane Katrina and that was where he first read the story of Zeitoun, and was so struck by it that he has now converted it himself into a full-scale narrative, with all the royalties donated to ‘the Zeitoun Foundation’.

The whirlwind and the saint