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A Steve Jobs favourite
I am reading what was probably the first book downloaded by Steve Jobs on his iPad 2. The book: Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramhansa Yogananda, an Indian yogi who moved to America in 1920 and died in Los Angeles in 1952. Steve Jobs’ biographer, Walter Isaacson, saw the book on the Apple cofounder’s iPad…
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Good old writers
Who says old geezers can’t write? Some of them die with the sharpest minds. That’s certainly true of the literary critic Frank Kermode, who has just died at the age of 90. Reading about his death yesterday, I turned to his essays published in the London Review of Books. You can’t tell his age from…
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Martin Amis on life and Kingsley Amis
Martin Amis describes seeing his father, Kingsley Amis in a dream in his autobiography, Experience. Published in 2000, five years after his father’s death, it’s one of the most intimate accounts of a father-and-son relationship that I have ever read. He writes: Why should I tell the story of my life? I do it because…
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Naipaul and The Enigma of Arrival
Reviewing Patrick French’s biography of Naipaul in the Times Literary Supplement, AN Wilson is absolutely right when he says: Naipaul is one of the best journalists; The Enigma of Arrival is a masterpiece. The Enigma bored me when I first read it many years ago, but now I realise how good it is. Just don’t…
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