Category: Books
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Auden on Auden
He wanted to be a mining engineer or a geologist. Then just a month after his 15th birthday, he was walking home from school with a friend one day in March 1922 when the friend asked him if he wrote poetry. “No,” he said. “Why don’t you?” asked the friend.…
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Playwright with a punch
What a man. Wilson wrote standing up, at a high, cluttered accounting desk. For years, an Everlast punching bag was suspended from the ceiling about two steps behind. When Wilson was in full flow and the dialogue was popping, he’d stop, pivot, throw a barrage of punches, then turn back…
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Honey Ryder, Pussy Galore, Goldfinger
Ursula Andress as Honey Ryder in Dr No was perhaps the most famous of the early Bond girls. But did Ian Fleming name Honey Ryder after the beautiful blonde Muriel Wright, who was nicknamed Honeytop? Ben McIntyre, author of a new Fleming biography, does not say so in his article…
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Rushdie wants to write another children’s book
Salman Rushdie has the same literary agent as Martin Amis and Philip Roth. Andrew Wylie must be three times lucky to represent such a triumvirate. Or is he? I don’t know about Roth, but Rusdhie and Amis are two of the most controversial — and stylish– writers around. But Rushdie…
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The sexy Mughals
City of Djinns: A Year In Delhi by William DalrympleThe foppish, snobbish Indian Muslim nobility were no different from the French and English aristocrats. They were as cultured, sophisticated and sensual. Eighteenth century Indian Muslim aristocrats visiting each other exchanged poems like the Restoration wits — with one difference: the…
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Naipaul interviewed
The Observer has an interview with Naipaul today. It begins with a delicious anecdote. When the head of the Swedish Academy called him at his home in England in October 2001 to tell him he had won the Nobel Prize, his wife picked up the phone and said he could…
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India and the Booker
The Booker Prize (now the Man Booker) has been won by novels set in India six times in the 40-year history of the Commonwealth’s biggest literature prize. That’s excluding The Life of Pi, the 2002 winner by the Canadian writer Yann Martel, which I haven’t read but which is also…
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Copulative conjunctions and more
Grammar Snobs Are Great Big Meanies by June Casagrande This book is as entertaining as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In fact, it’s naughtier. June Casagrande not only devotes a chapter to “copulative conjuctions” (about which more later); she has another chapter titled “I’m Writing This While Naked”. There’s this scene…
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Naipaul on “the last great Indian kingdom”
I am reading William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns after finishing VS Naipaul’s Magic Seeds. The two books couldn’t be more different. Dalrymple’s book is a delightful read, rich in anecdotes about modern Delhi and loving evocations of its past. Dalrymple admires the Muslims who ruled Delhi for centuries for their…
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Confessions of a famous American newsman
Confessions of an American Media Man by Tom Plate This is a book anyone interested in newspapers and magazines will enjoy. The American journalist Tom Plate, whose syndicated column appears in The Straits Times, looks back on his working life before he became a full-time teacher at the University of…
Readiscovery 