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Lord Gnome's Literary Companion
His review has got to be ‘in’ by mid-day tomorrow ... at about 9 pm his mind will grow relatively clear, and until the small hours he will sit ... skipping expertly through one book after another and laying each one down with the comment, ‘God, what tripe!’ ... Then suddenly he will snap into it. All the stale old phrases—‘a book that no one should miss’, ‘something memorable on every page’—jump into their places like iron filings obeying the magnet.
Thus did George Orwell, writing forty years ago in Confessions of a Book Reviewer , describe the labours of a typical literary hack. Precious little has changed over the intervening decades; the servility of the satirical magazine Private Eye . Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion assembles, in thematic order, the best of these columns to present an astringent, rude and funny survey of publishers and the published.
Thus did George Orwell, writing forty years ago in Confessions of a Book Reviewer , describe the labours of a typical literary hack. Precious little has changed over the intervening decades; the servility of the satirical magazine Private Eye . Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion assembles, in thematic order, the best of these columns to present an astringent, rude and funny survey of publishers and the published.
362 pages, Hardcover
First published December 1, 1994
About the author
Francis Wheen
27 books85 followersFrancis James Baird Wheen (born 22 January 1957) is a British journalist, writer and broadcaster.
Wheen was educated at Copthorne Prep School, Harrow School and Royal Holloway College, University of London. At Harrow he was a contemporary of Mark Thatcher who has been a recurring subject of his journalism.[citation needed] He is a member of the 'soap' side of the Wheen family, whose family business was the long-established "Wheen & Sons", soap-makers, as was revealed in the gossip column of the Daily Mail on 26 March 2007. He was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993.
He is the author of several books including a biography of Karl Marx, which won the Isaac Deutscher prize. A column for The Guardian ran for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies won him the George Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard.
Wheen broadcasts regularly (mainly on BBC Radio 4) and is a regular panellist on The News Quiz, in which he often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He is also one of the more frequently recruited guests for Have I Got News For You.
Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List, for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which was first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as former Prime Minister Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007 the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme.
Francis Wheen is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto and a close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In late-2005 Wheen was co-author, with journalist David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published a correction and apology for an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained that the article suggested he denied the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The writer Diana Johnstone also complained about references to her in the interview. The Guardian's then readers' editor Ian Mayes found that this had misrepresented Chomsky's position, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis. In his report for the Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument.
Wheen was educated at Copthorne Prep School, Harrow School and Royal Holloway College, University of London. At Harrow he was a contemporary of Mark Thatcher who has been a recurring subject of his journalism.[citation needed] He is a member of the 'soap' side of the Wheen family, whose family business was the long-established "Wheen & Sons", soap-makers, as was revealed in the gossip column of the Daily Mail on 26 March 2007. He was married to the writer Joan Smith between 1985 and 1993.
He is the author of several books including a biography of Karl Marx, which won the Isaac Deutscher prize. A column for The Guardian ran for several years. He writes for Private Eye and is the magazine's deputy editor. His collected journalism – Hoo-hahs and Passing Frenzies won him the George Orwell Prize in 2003. He has also been a regular columnist for the London Evening Standard.
Wheen broadcasts regularly (mainly on BBC Radio 4) and is a regular panellist on The News Quiz, in which he often referred to the fact that he resembles the former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith. He is also one of the more frequently recruited guests for Have I Got News For You.
Wheen wrote a docudrama, The Lavender List, for BBC Four on the final period of Harold Wilson's premiership, concentrating on his relationship with Marcia Williams, which was first screened in March 2006. It starred Kenneth Cranham as former Prime Minister Wilson and Gina McKee as Williams. In April 2007 the BBC paid £75,000 to Williams (Baroness Falkender) in an out-of-court settlement over claims made in the programme.
Francis Wheen is a signatory to the Euston Manifesto and a close friend of Christopher Hitchens. In late-2005 Wheen was co-author, with journalist David Aaronovitch and blogger Oliver Kamm, of a complaint to The Guardian after it published a correction and apology for an interview with Noam Chomsky by Emma Brockes. Chomsky complained that the article suggested he denied the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. The writer Diana Johnstone also complained about references to her in the interview. The Guardian's then readers' editor Ian Mayes found that this had misrepresented Chomsky's position, and his judgement was upheld in May 2006 by an external ombudsman, John Willis. In his report for the Guardian, Willis detailed his reasons for rejecting the argument.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 10, 2013
What was I expecting? Wit, lots of it. The sort of humour I find here on GR when I read on of MJ Nicholls reviews. What did I get? Tedium, repetition, the worst kind of small-minded Englishness.
Lord Gnome is the imaginary owner of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, a publication which is, I suspect, read mostly by the sort of people - politicians, journalists, ex-public schoolboys - that they like to mock. I wouldn't have thought of it as a publication which included book reviews, but they seem to have a disciplinary comittee which allocates a book review to whoever has been bold that week or whoever hates bloody novels the most.
The idea of mocking over-hyped authors and semi-literate bestsellers is a perfectly reasonable one, but somehow when every review begins with exasperation about the positive newspaper comment or number of copies sold, and then continues with weary scoffing at the idea that anybody could think this stuff worth reading, it quickly begins to wear thin . More often than not the case for the authors ineptness centres on a passage about sex which is quoted at length ( whoaarr, the length). We find out again and again that the books that newspapers review are not the ones that anybody wants to read and there is complete exasperation at those vexatious fools who think that anyone would want to read a book by one of those foreign chaps or, even worse, chapess with an impossible to pronounce name. So, when they trawl through publishers catalogues to mock the rubbish they are about to foist on a credulous public (and of course that happens all the time) their shoulders begin to shake at the idea, the sheer bloody stupidity of anyone deciding that it might be worth publishing someone from, say, Eastern bloody Europe.
Thus no mention is ever made of any author who doesn't write in English and almost every book is awful. It's a pity that it never occoured to anyone that if they left aside the latest Martin Amis or Jilly Cooper novel and tried one of those translated books they might just have found something worth their time.
Lord Gnome is the imaginary owner of the British satirical magazine Private Eye, a publication which is, I suspect, read mostly by the sort of people - politicians, journalists, ex-public schoolboys - that they like to mock. I wouldn't have thought of it as a publication which included book reviews, but they seem to have a disciplinary comittee which allocates a book review to whoever has been bold that week or whoever hates bloody novels the most.
The idea of mocking over-hyped authors and semi-literate bestsellers is a perfectly reasonable one, but somehow when every review begins with exasperation about the positive newspaper comment or number of copies sold, and then continues with weary scoffing at the idea that anybody could think this stuff worth reading, it quickly begins to wear thin . More often than not the case for the authors ineptness centres on a passage about sex which is quoted at length ( whoaarr, the length). We find out again and again that the books that newspapers review are not the ones that anybody wants to read and there is complete exasperation at those vexatious fools who think that anyone would want to read a book by one of those foreign chaps or, even worse, chapess with an impossible to pronounce name. So, when they trawl through publishers catalogues to mock the rubbish they are about to foist on a credulous public (and of course that happens all the time) their shoulders begin to shake at the idea, the sheer bloody stupidity of anyone deciding that it might be worth publishing someone from, say, Eastern bloody Europe.
Thus no mention is ever made of any author who doesn't write in English and almost every book is awful. It's a pity that it never occoured to anyone that if they left aside the latest Martin Amis or Jilly Cooper novel and tried one of those translated books they might just have found something worth their time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review