Peter Stothard's Blog, page 88

iPadding at last - and Mandelson too

This is the first post from my new iPad.

 I appreciate that I am late in this game and that there may be no new praise to give to this remarkable reading machine.

 I am not sure I have quite maximized it for writing.But doubtless that will come.

 Buying it was a success in itself, a morning trip to Regent St with TLS commercial director Jo Cogan, a wearily smiling promise from a boy in a blue T-shirt that an iPad might be available soon, a painstaking registration requiring memories of a...

Peter Mandelson again

I spent last night with Peter Mandelson's memoir, The Third Man - about which more later perhaps after I've written the review. Some of the pleasure of it comes from the confirmation of Downing Street gossip that I once thought I knew and maybe then even cared about. There would have been even more pleasure if the dark events described had been happening in someone else's  country.

It has certainly been  peculiar to be taken back to political events that I watched so closely as Editor of...

Peregrine Prykke revisiting

Peregrine Prykke was the name of a keen young critic, fresh to the 'London literary world'of the early 1970s, whose wide-eyed 'pilgrimage' around pubs, parties and poetry magazines was recorded in rhyming couplets by Clive James in 1974, reissued in an 'improved version' in 1976 and included in his 2003 collection, The Book of My Enemy. 

It is the 1976 edition that has been on my desk for the past few days, the orange paper cover faded to white around the spine and a pencil inscription...

Talking slavery in Ohio

A reader from Toledo, Ohio, called on the telephone just now (a rare enough thing in these email days) to say that he had bought my Spartacus Road in the new Overlook Press American edition (for which I thanked him politely) and had been shocked and horrified at my imputation that Spartacus was not trying to end slavery and to make mankind free.

He had bought the book on the strength of a favourable review in the Sunday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer in which there was no mention of s...

Back in the sack

 'Pro Roscio' was the shortened title of the first proper Latin book I ever read, from pages that are back beside me now this morning, the two words still overwritten by hand in bright blue ink on a grey cloth cover faded by schoolboy use and abuse. Why? Well, there has arrived at the TLS a bright green-and-yellow copy of this speech, Pro Sexto Roscio, that Cicero gave in 80 BC; and tonight, in celebration of that, I'm going to read it again.

Celebration? Yes, absolutely. There is...

Spartacus Road and The Onion

An early reader of my Spartacus Road suggested that I might have read - or might like to read - a story called "Die Zwiebel", The Onion, by the German artist and writer Kurt Schwitters.

 Its subject, he said, was the vivid butchering of the narrator's body followed by its reassembling with no apparent side effects.

 Just my kind of thing, he thought.

I hadn't read it. And I didn't take his advice. My personal experiences in this area, while not exactly as Schwitteresque as he was suggesting, ...

The greatest living Islamic artist?

Who is the greatest living Islamic artist?

It's not the kind of question I would normally expect to be asked. 

But it came  today - on the phone and quite unexpectedly - and my best answer was McCoy Tyner, the art-changing pianist for John Coltrane in the early 60's just before I first came, very strangely came, to jazz.

I knew Tyner was a Muslim then because an older school friend had told me – and not in a good way. I was more or less sure he was still alive. My mind was blank about...

Anne Carson's Nox by the river

Anne Carson's Nox was not, at first sight, the best choice to read in the sunshine, on the grass, beside the Thames, last Sunday afternoon. It is a book in a box shaped in homage to a coffin, a concertina of pages that would have been easier to handle in a chair and bears an eery resemblance to sheet for wrapping dead bodies, an assemblage of artful lexicography and personal memoir, fractured and reconstructed around a melancholic Latin poem.

Not only did I consume it at a single river-bank ...

Is that an ivory-billed woodpecker that I don't see before me?

In the whole of the world the ivory-billed woodpecker is probably the most loved creature that probably doesn't exist.

Perhaps there are still a few of them deep in the Big Woods forest of eastern Arkansas when this great rap-rapping creature, also known as the Lord God woodpecker after the reaction of everyone who thinks they have seen it, was allegedly spotted by admirers in 2005. Safer perhaps to stick to the last reliable sighting made in 1944.

There are many plaintive accounts of this b...

Butchered? Or merely builders?

 According to the TV and newspapers in Britain this week the objects of attention here are two of eighty skeletons of ancient British gladiators, victims of wild beasts, swords and axes, once upon a time butchered in York to make a Roman holiday and featured two thousand years later to entertain us once again.

At the TLS we remain a little sceptical. Maybe these men did die before a baying crowd in a provincial Colosseum. Or perhaps they were among the more numerous animal hunters or...