I have difficulty thinking of Martin Amis as an old man, let alone a dead one. The work of his middle years was so spectacular and unforgettable, such a breath-taking high-wire act, that it has somehow made what followed seem little more than a slow fade. In recent years, I have glanced at Amis’s later… Continue reading Smart Mart: the high-wire act that fell to earth
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It is odd to be knocked sideways by the death of someone who is 100 years old, and yet Ronnie Blythe’s departure last weekend has come as a shock. The friendship of Ronnie was compared by his friend a fellow-writer Roger Deakin to an old oak – something that always seemed to have been there,… Continue reading Ronnie Blythe: the death of a tribal storyteller
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Just now and then, life throws up a character who turns out to be a sort of Rorschach Test of public taste – someone who, like the famous inkblot, can prompt reactions which reveal deeper psychological truths. Usually these Rorschach characters are obvious – Johnson, Trump, Nadine Dorries – but sometimes there are surprise candidates.… Continue reading We Need to Talk About Meghan. What exactly did she do wrong?
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As the World Cup unfolds, we hear every day about how football spills into the wider world – into politics, into the way people think and feel. It’s a symbol of something, we’re told, or a metaphor for something else. It’s far more significant than 22 men chasing a ball around. Normally I would be… Continue reading The moral harm of Michael Beale
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The working life of a professional writer is not exciting. You write. You read what you have written. You sigh. You try again until, with luck, something passable appears on the page or screen before you. Now and then – again, with luck – you get published. Rows or bust-ups in the little world of… Continue reading ‘Play nicely, children,’ said the Society of Authors …. They didn’t.
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The papers have been full of reviews and interviews with the author Julie Myerson, who has written a novel which is, according to the Sunday Time, ‘a bold two-fingered salute to her attackers a few years back.’ I have a feeling that might include me. Back in 2009, I was caught up in a minor,… Continue reading JULIE, JEREMY AND AN ODD KIND OF FAMILY SAGA
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‘This, here, now, is what happiness is. Enjoy it.’ So wrote the poet Wendy Cope, welcoming the publication in 2002 of A Life Drawing, an illustrated memoir by the great Shirley Hughes whose death was announced this week. At a moment in our history when happiness feels like an elusive and distant thing, the work… Continue reading The artist of happiness – remembering Shirley Hughes
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If writers and musicians have a token bird that symbolises what they do, it is not, however much they may like it to be, a nightingale, a skylark or a peacock. It’s a magpie. We are all, while writing, scavenging around for something shiny and brilliant from the past to take back to our own… Continue reading TIP FOR SONGWRITERS – YOU’VE GOT TO PICK A POCKET OR TWO
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The words in this headline were emailed to me a few years back, shortly after the death of Bob Hope. At the time, I was writing a twice-weekly opinion column for the Independent, and I had devoted one of these to the memory of the grinning funny man. It was not a fond eulogy. I… Continue reading ‘YOU, SIR, ARE AN ABSOLUTE SHIT’
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Predictably, inevitably, the great novelist Philip Roth is now receiving the full Updike treatment. He has become ‘problematic’. His novels should ‘recontextualised’. He is on the wrong side of Me Too. It has been a few years now since that tide turned for John Updike. One moment he was a much-loved adornment of the literary… Continue reading PHILIP ROTH – JUST ANOTHER PENIS WITH A THESAURUS?
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