I had hoped to bring you a little more fine detail about Cherie Blair’s menstrual cycle this week — I had provisional charts mapped out and so on. But at the last moment I came over a little queasy. Obviously all of us need to know precisely when she is ovulating, in case we should wish to impregnate her while her husband is away lecturing at Yale or bringing peace to the Middle East. But my nerve failed me. This is a personal failure and should not reflect badly on the lovely Cherie. She is believed to be the first inhabitant of 10 Downing Street to have shared with the electorate the delicate comings and goings of activity in her fallopian tubes and beyond, and the first to have called Princess Margaret a stuck-up old slapper; for this stuff alone we should thank her profusely. She has greatly added to the mirth and gaiety of the nation. She is one of many dispossessed former New Labour luminaries trying desperately to force shut the coffin lid on the regime they brought into life, the cadaver inside the coffin still palely bleating that he’s not actually dead. The various hideous autobiographies and diary excerpts published in the last year or so seem to take as a given that it’s all over and that Gordon Brown’s administration is akin to the discarded tail of a sand lizard, twitching for a few moments as if possessed of sentient life but in fact devoid of purpose and hope. Just the vestigial nerve endings doing their very temporary stuff, disconnected from the centre. ron liddle, the spectator
Now this is just a guess but I have to bet Mr. Liddle is not terrifically impressed with Cherie Blair’s Memoirs.
Written by jay on May 15th, 2008 with 2 comments.
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The Globe and Mail is asking for nominations for the fifty best books in English. It is good fun to see what people send in - I suspect the Globe will rather wish that they had said “written in English” as there are a lot of people who figure that “War and Peace” is a great English novel.
However, near the lea shore we see this:
As for Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey: fie upon you sir! C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower series is a broadside you cannot withstand. Horatio is the Star Wars (first film) to Jack’s Star Trek the first TV year. chris woodall, globe and mail
LOL. I enjoyed the Hornblower novels but I prefer the O’Brians. Hornblower seems too much in earnest whereas Jack Aubrey has the sardonic wit of a man of his time.
Written by jay on April 14th, 2008 with 13 comments.
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At one point a few years ago I made much of my living reviewing books for newspapers. Mainly history, biography and science but i was perfectly willing to review novels or whatever came to hand. The reviewing market has pretty much vanished in Canada and in much of the United States and I have moved on. But I still like reviewing.
So, an experiment:I am going to be posting reviews on this blog from time to time. They will have lot of Amazon links in them and, while my regular readers are unlikely to hit the links I am hoping that the irregulars as well as search engine arrivals may buy the occasional book. Which will let me buy more books to review and thus create a virtuous circle. The reviews will be short and will be of books I am reading rather than books which have been sent for review. However, if publicists or authors want to send me books by all means do and I will review them here.
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Anthony Powell: A Life
by Michael Barber
A quick tour through the long and seemingly happy life of Anthony Powell, author of A Dance to the Music of Time.
Powell’s life is a significant challenge to a biographer simply because Powell wrote so much about himself. Michael Barber rises to the challenge in Anthony Powell: A Life by stepping outside Powell’s own autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling and going to the many interviews Powell gave over his career as well as the recollections of his many friends.
Anthony Powell: A Life is an entertaining first cut at the definitive Powell biography and manages to avoid the dryness which too often infects literary biography. It does not, however, give much more sense of Powell’s private life or his social life than the Dance or the auto-biography does. It is, as Barber declares at the outset, not the authorized biography which is, apparently, to be written by another hand. Which means this Life is not informed by the letters of both Powell himself and his wife, Lady Violet.
The strength of this life is that it gives the reader the flavour of Powell’s life and his times.
If you are interested in Malcolm Muggeridge (before his religious mania struck), George OrwellorEvelyn Waugh Barber provides a quick and very readable guide to “the England which made them” through the eyes of one of the greatest observers of that England: Anthony Powell.
All gone now I am afraid.
Written by jay on December 29th, 2007 with no comments.
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