Peter Stothard's Blog, page 89

Mary Beard throws a fig

When a chap is sitting on the floor at the British Museum, with both hands fully employed and both legs sticking out to be shod by gentlewomen-in-a-hurry, he gets a certain insight into what was once required to wear a Roman toga. The earlier stages, folding enough linen for a king-sized duvet and listening to ever more anxious shouts of 'clavi up', were simple tasks compared to the problems caused by not having put one's sandals on first.

Mine was a late decision to take part in the 100th...

Christopher Hitchens, hangman, Heller and Hay

My last sight of Christopher Hitchens at a public meeting was during the Hay Festival a decade ago when, slowly, deliberately and very visibly he staged a one-man walk out during the foreign policy section of a speech by Bill Clinton.

My first ever sight of Christopher Hitchens (in public or in private) was at the Oxford Union four decades ago when he led  a noose-wielding attack on the lesser figure of the British Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart, deemed then to be excessively uncritical o...

Yugh! There's sauce all over our post

The TLS post today smells like the trash of a Texas roadhouse and looks like the mouth of a ninety-a-day Marlboro man.

The cleaners are hard at work in the mail room and the publicity department of Macmillan publishers is in as bad odour with the post-sorters as we are.

It is not unknown for new books to arrive with attractions attached - pink nail files for the latest teenage vampire horror and other stuff of that ilk. But a bottle of Bar B Q sauce is a new low, especially when the bottle ...

David Remnick's bridge to Obama

In the Washington offices of The Times where I worked in 1992 there was a cupboard of cardboard clippings files about American politicians in whom British readers might just possibly show some interest. It was not a big cupboard. Even amongst those with presidential ambition, there were few outside George H.W. Bush's government who much excited the newsdesk in London - and even fewer of those who had time in their fund-raising schedules to spend with British reporters whose readers could...

A fate for a kingmaker

What happens to kingmakers once the kings have been made?

So asks a concerned supporter of Nick Clegg, wondering whether both Brown and Cameron might be cunningly displaced by their man in a rerun of the Wars of the Roses and what might happen after that.

On press day at the TLS, there is no time for more than a brief note of the Battle of Barnet, the one in 1471 which restored Edward IV, not the one which returned the excellent Theresa Villiers to the Commons last week.

That was the battle ...

A quiet night in with a book

My friend and colleague Mary Beard gave a firm 'this one not for me' response to the arrival on her desk of Matthew Dennison's biography of Livia, wife of Augustus. What was the point of it?

"Why do people imagine they can write biographies of individual Roman empresses, for whom there is almost no reliable evidence whatsoever? And when the blurb claims that it rests on "extensive new research", what do they mean by that ? What NEW research is there to do on Livia, the wife of the first...

Caesar, Orwell and Tolkien follow the Figes example

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
We don't often publish unvarnished links here. But it is good to know that the Figes affair has created some imaginative responses as well as bad blood.  Check this out from the excellent Martin Levin of The Globe and Mail, Toronto.

Won't Speed Again

 'Speed awareness, sir?'
 
The quick and quiet answer was 'yes'.
 
In the foyer of the Comfort Hotel this morning there was no special gain to had from such whispered discretion. It was not as though our band of middle-aged males were queuing for cures to diseases we had brought upon ourselves by inappropriate behaviour. We may have worn 8 am faces like the denizens of an STD clinic and don't-look-at-me grey clothes; but our number plates had merely been photographed travelling at speeds...

One lesson of the Figes affair

In today's issue of the TLS we print our account of a story which we began last week, a sorry tale that has become known in Britain as the Orlando Figes affair.
 
There is no reason to repeat the details here. Read JC's account instead.
 
It has certainly been an unusual saga, set out well also in yesterday's Independent newspaper. Many other writers have played their part, drawn by reports of literary skullduggery and arguments about the ethics of reviewing in the internet age.
 
Only one point ...

Granta to Glenda

If my dying laptop were capable of a picture-upload (I never thought I would use such a phrase: it may not even be right) I would be heading this post with pink female genitalia in the form of a purse or maybe a purse in the form of pink female genitalia. If you want to know which formulation would be the more appropriate you can go to Mary Beard's blog, have a look - and come straight back of course.

Last Sunday I was at the Cambridge Wordfest event to discuss the state of literary...