- Search for:
0
0

Where to next?

Articles & Extracts

The Prince, the Showgirl and Me | Monday, 4 June

The Prince, the Showgirl and Me | Monday, 4 June

Mr P is a tall, thin, gloomy man with black-rim spectacles. His sparse black hair is brushed back and he has a black moustache. He puffs a pipe continually

Shaving with My Father

Shaving with My Father

Bernie Taupin and I have one thing (and only one, I suspect) in common. Catching an interview with him on the radio recently, I discovered that the man who wrote the words for all those Elton John hits was, like me, reared on recitations of stirring narrative verse, mostly from the Victorian age.

SF magazine subscribers only

Into the Wilderness

Into the Wilderness

One day a few years ago, in my local independent bookshop, staff member Sallie and I were talking about books, and she took from the shelf a slim, newly published hardback novel, West (2018) by Carys Davies, and told me how much she loved it.

SF magazine subscribers only

Academic Angst

In one sense Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) is very much a book of its time; but in another sense it is timeless. When I came to reread it recently, I feared it might not have worn well. It was, after all, published seventy years ago; it was received then as a satire on the stultified and snobbish society of 1950s provincial Britain. I first read it in about 1970 when I was in my teens, and it still seemed relevant then; but attitudes have changed considerably since, just as I have myself, alas. I need not have worried. The tone of the book still rings true today. And it remains very, very funny. Take, for example, Amis’s famous description of a hangover:

SF magazine subscribers only

Looking on the Dark Side

Looking on the Dark Side

One morning, many years ago, I was lying in bed in my grand-parents’ house when something big and black fell down the chimney, landed in the empty fireplace and scattered the ashes. Instantly, I pulled the duvet over my head and breathed as quietly as I could.

SF magazine subscribers only

Dublin Shades

McDaid’s in Dublin is not hard to find. I came across it last winter looming just off Grafton Street, one of the city’s tartier thoroughfares. It’s a high-ceilinged Victorian pub with an austerely ecclesiastical aspect; Dublin’s old pubs share with its churches the most uninviting façades in the city. I was early and had to stamp about in the cold before dropping in for the one.

SF magazine subscribers only

Paradise Lost

Long before my home county became fashionable – after the Freuds had colonized Walberswick but before the county began to feature in the weekend colour supplements – Suffolk only seemed to pique the public consciousness through the work of two local grandes dames of crime writing.

SF magazine subscribers only

Getting it Right

Getting it Right

It’s a little unsettling, after a rewarding reread of Ximenes on the Art of the Crossword (1966), to take to Wikipedia and see the book’s author, pipe-puffing public-school housemaster Derrick S. Macnutt, described by a former pupil as ‘a bully and a brute’, ‘widely known for the pleasure he obtained from caning the boys in his charge’.

SF magazine subscribers only

Ingerlond Their Ingerlond

Ingerlond Their Ingerlond

Not long after I first became a literary editor (at the New Statesman), I ran a glowing lead review of an incendiary first novel: Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. This, I thought, should be the essence of the job: to find and praise fearless new voices and, along the way, annoy the fogeys and the fuddy-duddies.

SF magazine subscribers only

The Hard Stuff

The beginning of my teens came ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. I regard it as highly appropriate that Larkin made the first of those milestones a novel, because it wasn’t only sex and rock and roll that had begun. Penguin Modern Classics, in their distinctive slate-grey livery, had also arrived, providing us hungry young readers with a list of books to grow up by. In due course PMC introduced me to Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway and Camus – and, later, Gide, Hesse and Sartre – offering the chance to luxuriate in amoral existential disgust, in contemplation of the meaning of meaninglessness.

SF magazine subscribers only

Something in the Dust

Something in the Dust

Towards the end of my first day at Weymouth College in Dorset, where I had been accepted on a stone-carving course, I wandered over to the library. Several hours in the workshop hadn’t eased my sense of discombobulation; neither had my tutor’s missing finger.

SF magazine subscribers only

Not Just for Christmas

Not Just for Christmas

I’ve always found deciding on a Christmas Book the most difficult task of my literary year. I read enthusiastically all the time, but it’s only in late November or early December that I start to get twitchy about this year’s special pick, and I always worry that I may have left the decision too late.

SF magazine subscribers only

As Old as the Hills

As Old as the Hills

Like space, the past is always nearer than we think. As a boy, I knew a woman who once cut Thomas Hardy’s hair. For his part, Hardy knew an old countryman who had set eyes on Napoleon when the Bellerophon put into Plymouth Sound, en route to St Helena. The Napoleonic Wars are just three human lifetimes away and if you get to my age you will know that a lifetime is no vast span. Anthropologists have a thing called the ‘long generation’ – the era extending from the birth of one person to the death of the latest-born person that he or she could have met. This is where it gets hair-raising. As James Hawes puts it, in the foreword to his exhilarating The Shortest History of England (2021), ‘Seven long generations . . . the old and the young holding hands – and we are back at the Battle of Hastings.’ This inspires the same sort of vertigo as the knowledge that standing in central London you are nearer to outer space than you are to, say, Market Harborough.

SF magazine subscribers only

Stiff Martinis and Bitter Marriages

Stiff Martinis and Bitter Marriages

I was an innocent when I first read Updike, and I can still remember those late teenage afternoons when, in an agony of tedium, I haunted the aisles of second-hand bookshops and Manchester Central Library, reading feverishly, hunting for sex. Moll Flanders promised much but remained, finally, coy. A copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, bought furtively from a basement bookshop in Charlotte Street, proved a great disappointment. No sooner had a glance been exchanged than the scene faded away into modest ellipses . . . it was only embarrassingly late that I realized it was a pre-1960 edition. But John Updike’s Couples (1968) was very definitely a product of the Swinging Sixties. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ Georgene Thorne tells the main character, Piet Hanema, as we embark on the first of very many couplings in a novel where the sex is mostly adulterous, sometimes loving, always luxuriantly described. Wide-eyed, I fell into the featherbed of Updike’s post-lapsarian prose.

SF magazine subscribers only

A Very Good Egg

A Very Good Egg

Before I left for university, my mother gave me three things she thought I might find useful: a small non-stick milk pan, one of those wooden spoons with a square corner – ‘for getting right to the edges’, she said – and a huge hardback recipe book, from the dust jacket of which beamed the reassuring face of Delia Smith: the new, single-volume Delia’s Complete Illustrated Cookery Course (1989).

SF magazine subscribers only

Something Cooking

Something Cooking

I was passing through Newark, New Jersey, in 2002 when I picked up a paperback thriller in the airport bookstore. It was by Robert B. Parker, a writer I had never heard of, and I can’t remember what attracted me to it: almost certainly its portability and low price. I was at that time the New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. My beat was everywhere east of the Rockies, and I frequently took short-hop flights to cover stories. A banker had absconded with a bunch of cash in Baltimore; a stripper had been elected mayor in a small conservative town in Colorado; there was a videogame convention in Chicago – and I hopped on a plane.

SF magazine subscribers only

Sign up to our e-newsletter

Sign up for dispatches about new issues, books and podcast episodes, highlights from the archive, events, special offers and giveaways.