Steven Mcgregor | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

Discovering bourbon on Brick Lane

When I was stationed in Kentucky I never drank bourbon. It wasn’t until I came to London that the drink became something special to me. I always passed a bowling alley on Brick Lane with fluorescent lights and unmarked taxis waiting by the door. One night they had two for one drinks, so I went inside. It was just as I suspected: clattering pins and certified drunks. But the barman, Mike, loved bourbon. ‘People here only have this with Coke,’ he lamented, and snuck a drink from a small tumbler without ice or water. Booker’s, an uncut, small-batch bourbon made by Jim Beam, was his choice. But behind him on the shelves there were about 20 other options. Bourbon takes its name from Bourbon County, Kentucky, and many distilleries are based in the hills of the Bluegrass region in the northern corner of the state.

Steven Mcgregor

The Iraqi Christ, by Hassan Blasim - review

Steven Mcgregor

The Iraqi Christ, by Hassan Blasim - review

There is much about Hassan Blasim that demands attention. He is an Iraqi. He escaped from Saddam’s dictatorship in 2000 by walking to Iran and smuggling himself into Europe. He has a confident, almost intimidating demeanour. And with the growing stack of literature about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan all penned by westerners, there is an important space for Blasim to fill. The Iraqi Christ is his second collection of short fiction, the first being The Madman of Freedom Square, both translated into English by Jonathan Wright. Blasim has been called, ‘the best writer of Arabic fiction alive’. It is is not his identity, how-ever, but the quality of his writing that makes his voice striking. It is deeply troubling and complex, the metaphors arresting and violent.

Steven Mcgregor

Brendan Simms: A strong, united Europe is in Britain’s interest

Steven Mcgregor

Brendan Simms: A strong, united Europe is in Britain’s interest

Since the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, European history has been dominated by two themes: the centrality of Germany and the primacy of foreign policy. This is the argument of Brendan Simms’ new book, Europe: the struggle for supremacy 1453 to the present. Simms is a professor of the History of International Relations at Cambridge University and his decidedly European focus has allowed him to craft a detailed yet expansive account in the style of Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. One afternoon we sat down at Penguin’s offices on the Strand to discuss these issues, as well as their relevance to the current European Union debate. ‘Grand strategy’ is a term associated with your work—it features in Three Victories and a Defeat, for instance.

Steven Mcgregor

Fobbit by David Abrams - review

Steven Mcgregor

Fobbit by David Abrams - review

Fobbit, by David Abrams, is an attempt at describing a wartime tour from different perspectives, including soldiers and support personnel. Chapter by chapter our viewpoint rotates within this cast of characters. Indeed, for every three infantrymen, five soldiers are required in forward deployed locations to cook, care for wounded, file paperwork, et cetera. Abrams himself performed such a support role as a public affairs officer deployed to Baghdad in 2005. Spending most of his time on Forward Operating Bases or FOBs, Abrams was one of many Fobbits, a kind of GWOT technocrat, fighting the war from behind a desk. Two characters feature in the narrative, the Fobbit Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding and the infantry captain Abe Shrinkle.

Steven Mcgregor

War is not to be envied

Steven Mcgregor

War is not to be envied

Donald Anderson is a former US Air Force Colonel and current professor of English Literature at the US Air Force Academy. His new book, Gathering Noise from my Life: A Camouflaged Memoir, is a controlled crash, like all landings. It skips and judders, the wheels skidding across the tarmac, until finally the plane is at rest. One line aphorisms such as, ‘William Burroughs was for thieving and against paraphrasing altogether,’ are followed by paragraphs which, every so often, glide into anecdotes mingling observations of war with memories of a small town upbringing in Butte, Montana. Given a setting in which rugged individualism is a generational mantle, it is not surprising that much of the ‘camouflaged’ memoir is about Anderson’s relationship with both his Dad and the more shadowy figure of his Grandfather: ‘When my father was a kid, he watched his father defeat a local tough.

Steven Mcgregor

Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize - The Walking Wounded

Steven Mcgregor

Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize - The Walking Wounded

This is the runner-up in our recent Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize. The rest of the shortlist will be published in the coming days. At the entrance is a pale stone bower of equilateral arches and then a brass-plated door opens into a small vestibule and after a turn there is the Chamber. The golden Sovereign’s Throne: empty. Five rows of long benches, red leathered, are stacked on either side. Above, between sets of bar-traced windows, bronze statues of chain-mailed knights hold broadswords and maces. Some of their faces are cast downward as if watching the proceedings below. From my seat in the guest area, near the entrance, I could see the Labour peers to the right of the throne and the backs of the Crossbench peers and then the rows of the Conservative opposition.

Steven Mcgregor

Thornton Wilder’s theatrics in The Cabala

Steven Mcgregor

Thornton Wilder’s theatrics in The Cabala

I was on a date once in Atlanta, Georgia. We decided on the theatre and there was only one show playing, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. After a night time drive under the arms of blue mossed oaks we made it to Emory University and took our seats and the curtain rose on a Victorian living room. Cautiously, with a canine playfulness, from out behind a sofa, tromped a dinosaur. I kept thinking of this moment as I read Wilder’s first novel, The Cabala. Originally published in 1926 before he became a renowned playwright, Wilder attempted the same tricks here. He interjects Keats, Virgil, and even incarnate Mercury, into a contemporary 1920s narrative, in order to argue that the human condition has never improved, that culture is only a jacket that fits over a skeleton.

Steven Mcgregor

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished business

Steven Mcgregor

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished business

It’s hard enough convincing people to read finished novels much less unfinished ones — though perhaps our cultural obsession with The Great Gatsby is reason enough to republish F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon. The partial manuscript now appears alongside his personal essay The Crack Up in one slim volume. Read the former but discard the latter. I loved Tycoon the first time I read it, though I’m a Fitzgerald addict and was once mistaken for his grandson one summer while drinking champagne at the Trois Couronnes in Vevey. I claim no relation and attribute the mistake to my Puritanical upbringing: that is, my being overdressed and having combed my hair. Nevertheless, there’s much to enjoy in The Last Tycoon, indeed the same elements that characterize all of Fitzgerald’s work.

Steven Mcgregor

The Hamlet of the trenches: Parade’s End reviewed

Steven Mcgregor

The Hamlet of the trenches: Parade’s End reviewed

Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End is being republished as well as adapted for the screen by the BBC. I first discovered the tetralogy when, in an attempt to improve my chances, I asked my future mother-in-law for a list of must-read novels. Parade’s End and The Good Soldier featured near the top of the list. The Good Soldier is Ford’s most remembered work and at one time he considered it his first and last novel. In his memoirs, Return to Yesterday, he recalls that on the 28th of June 1914, ‘there was to be no more writing for me—not even any dabbling in literary affairs.’ But then there was the war and he found himself in the Welsh Regiment, at forty-one years of age, living through what he termed ‘Armageddon.

Steven Mcgregor

The fictional House of Lords

Steven Mcgregor

The fictional House of Lords

The House of Lords has yet again survived reform. ‘We have been discussing this issue for 100 years and it really is time to make progress,’ the Prime Minister said last month in a pleading, exculpatory tone. What then is the trend in popular culture? Writing for the Times Literary Supplement in 1949, Anthony Powell observed an, ‘ever-widening gap between the popular concept of a peer and the existing reality.’ He found greatest fault with nineteenth century novels and plays, ‘where a lord, silly or sinister, handsome or grotesque, is rarely allowed to strike a balance between extremes of conduct.’ Powell’s nineteenth century examples would certainly have included Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe, staged at the Savoy Theatre in 1882.

Steven Mcgregor

Interview: Nick Makoha’s shame

Steven Mcgregor

Interview: Nick Makoha’s shame

“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his first collection of poetry and his new theatre performance, ‘My Father and other Superheroes.’ Uganda is a source of tension for Makoha as both the place of his birth but also a place he fled, a place from which he feels distant. “Most people are from somewhere else,” he says. “So the story of the exile isn’t the minority, we’re the majority. Look at T.S. Eliot, by all rights and purposes he belongs to America. He liked French poets, Italian poets.” Makoha seems easily at home where we sit at Euphorium café in Islington in a rare patch of midday sun.

Steven Mcgregor

Exiled at the Poetry Parnassus

Steven Mcgregor

Exiled at the Poetry Parnassus

While the Ancient Greeks ceased hostilities for the Olympic Games, this summer will be business as usual in many parts of the world. Exiled poets from Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, China, and Uganda presented their work yesterday afternoon at the Southbank center, participating in the ongoing Poetry Parnassus. Readings took place in the cavernous, skylit, Front Room at QEH. Yet the solemnity of spoken word kept being interrupted by river watchers on the terrace coming in to order more drinks at the bar or the walkie-talkie of the janitor as she made her way around the audience, sweeping up rubbish. Mir Mahfuz Ali, who was shot in the throat by a cop in Bangladesh, began the event in his gravelly rough sotto voce.

Steven Mcgregor

A writer’s vanity

Steven Mcgregor

A writer’s vanity

‘Jordan’s fourth biography, that’s vanity. Only writers are subjected to this kind of inquisition about how their work reaches the viewer,’ quipped a panelist at a recent Birkbeck University event on self-publishing. Someone had mentioned the pejorative, ‘vanity press’ and the room of writers stirred. All were seated in neat rows in a wood paneled lecture hall off Russell Square. Appropriate given that Virginia Woolf, who once lived two blocks away, self-published. Previously, this was known as private publishing. According to Alison Baverstock, another panelist and authority on self-publishing, the Bronte sisters, Willa Cather, Mark Twain, James Joyce, all covered the initial cost of bringing their work to market, at one point in their careers.

Steven Mcgregor

The battle for free speech in China

Steven Mcgregor

The battle for free speech in China

I haven't been much drawn to erotica or political allegory, but Chen Xiwo's I Love my Mum changed that. Relaxed, in an open necked shirt and jeans, at a recent English PEN event in Bloomsbury, Xiwo looked the antithesis of a persecuted writer. He appeared with a range of other speakers, from exiled writers to documentary filmmakers, to discuss contemporary literature in China. Many writers at the event are trying to provoke, trying to inspire change. Xiwo, for instance, penned a novel gilded in matricide and incest to comment on the Chinese state, aptly titled, I Love my Mum. It was banned in 2007; the reason why was ‘classified information.’ With a slight grin and an energetic, even mischievous manner, Xiwo recounted his lawsuit against the censorship authorities which culminated in a secret court hearing where he was told I Love My Mum would remain banned because it ‘was not helpful to humanity… it was obscene and erotic and… it would influence people to do bad things’.

Steven Mcgregor

Ending a war story

Steven Mcgregor

Ending a war story

What, if any, are the similarities between the great novels of past wars, such as Somerset Maugham’s The Hero (the Boer War), Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End (WWI), and Evelyn Waugh’s The Sword of Honor Trilogy (WWII)? And is there a connection between these wartime experiences and our current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? As a veteran of the recent Iraq War, I found myself haunted by these novels not because of how our response to war has changed, but because the experiences of troops returning from battlefields in the Cape and Verdun when compared to those of Baghdad and Helmand matches with a startling sameness. It would be a mistake to dismiss the novels by Waugh, Ford and Maugham as interchangeable.

Steven Mcgregor

Remembering Gilbert Adair

Steven Mcgregor

Remembering Gilbert Adair

Gilbert Adair was a mentor to me, even in the year following his stroke, which was when we became closest, and I knew him best. I had just left the US Army and moved to London when I met Gilbert at a cocktail party at a friend’s flat in Maida Vale. Though it was an unseasonably warm autumn evening, he still wore a suit and tie, with a gray scarf draped around his shoulders. He looked remarkably urbane, every bit the author and critic, and we launched into a conversation about Christopher Isherwood, a writer that we both admired. “Do you want to touch the hem of my sleeve?” he asked, with mock-seriousness. “I interviewed him once—during a trip to California.” And he told me a story of when they met, in a crescent shaped bar in Santa Monica, and Isherwood appeared at the far end, his tanned handsome face glowing.