What I'm Reading 3

In his brilliant book of essays Working the Room, Geoff Dyer describes falling in love with this woman. But they’ve never met. In fact, he’s never seen or heard of her in any context other than this one photograph. How can that be?

“Well, whoever she is, she’s beautiful. Actually, I can’t really tell if that’s true, for the simple reason that I can’t see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I’m in love with her.”

Eloquently put, but is it possible to fall in love with a figure in a photograph? Well, possibly. We’ve all leafed through a book and found ourselves fleetingly besotted. It's important, too, that we differentiate between falling in love and being in love, the former a state of vertiginous possibility, the latter one of some certainty. 


And can’t it feel like we love someone before we ever lay eyes on them? The feeling that we’ve waited for such a person, and when we finally see them they are perfectly familiar. And yet we think of love as an intense attachment to somebody as they are at this very moment. But something of love is constituted by the idea of a person, not simply (or only) the physical being before us. If we can love something not yet there — the possibility of a future, the person we hope they become — then falling in love with someone you’ve only seen or heard isn’t quite as absurd as it sounds. 

Unfortunate Events

A man wandering nonchalantly through a car park with an assault rifle, an old lady prostrate on the pavement whilst a man tends to his bicycle, a parked van in flames, a woman squatting behind a car with her trousers down. Just some of the moments of menace, crisis and comedy unwittingly captured by Google Street View. Michael Wolf spent hundreds of hours finding and re-photographing these calamities for A Series of Unfortunate Events. 

The Toning Shoe Fad

I’ve always doubted if the ludicrous ‘toning’ shoe actually worked. Turns out this gimmick is more likely to be doing you harm than good. 

Draft cover 3

Here’s my cover for Alex Capus’s forthcoming novel A Matter of Time. Delicately made criticisms that lead to a change for the better will be rewarded with a free copy of the book. Make two worthy suggestions and I’ll send you two copies, and so on, until you have more than you know what to do with.

On Service

Before I get going I should make it clear that as a student I worked for a few days in a job that required me to serve people. During that brief stint, the foul nature of some of the customers was enough to ensure that I would never unthinkingly say an unkind word to a waiter or waitress. I try to be kind. I give the benefit of the doubt. I have even been known to smile. But this desire for harmony is being strained, and here’s why.

We’re crawling out of recession, times are hard. Quite understandably, restaurants, cafes and shops are trying to make the most of every customer. But there’s a disconcerting development afoot: waiters and waitresses, it seems, are being urged by their managers to push customers into spending more. If I have to endure many more exchanges like this, I cannot vow to keep my composure in check:

ME: A bowl of muesli, a black coffee and an almond croissant, please.

WAITRESS: Great. And would you like some fresh orange juice?

ME: Just these two, please [he places a packet of pasta and a jar of ragu sauce on the counter].

SERVER: And would you like some Parmesan today?

ME: I would like the spaghetti alle vongole, please?

WAITER: No starter for you today?

ME: Please could we have two glasses of tap water and the wine list?

WAITER: Of course. And maybe a glass of champagne to start?

On each of these occasions I have forced a ‘no thank you’ through gritted teeth. If I want something, I will ask for it.

Perhaps because it’s new to me, this aggressive selling is so much more infuriating than being constantly pestered (‘is everything ok with your meal’? To which answer should be ‘It was, and we’re having lunch’). It's more annoying, even, than the constant refilling of wine glasses. The waiter deliberately pouring all that remains of the bottle into one glass before asking if you’d like another. Worse than a maitre d’ who ums and ahs as he surveys the legions of empty tables, pretending it’ll be an effort to fit you in. Somehow they always find room.

Venting Spleen again

A friend, whose opinion I value highly, read this and urged me not to let my blog become a place of perpetual whining and sounding-off. One diatribe after another is no fun, she said. And besides, these rants of yours are fogeyish and don’t show you in a good light. And yet I've always thought the French dramatist Henry de Montherlant was on to something when he said: ‘happiness writes white’.

So I’m going to keep this piece of spleen venting brief. Not because I don’t have a lot to say on the issue, and certainly not because the garment in question does not deserve thousands of words of ridicule and scorn (it does), but because this thing is so ludicrous that one picture is all that’s required.

When did somebody first think that neither trousers nor shorts would suffice, and that these were the answer?

p.s. there’s another rant to come this afternoon, after which I’ll do my best to be positive.

How to Begin 2

One other glaring omission (and one missed opportunity) from yesterday’s list of best opening lines. Some openings are so synonymous with the book that eventually the line comes to stand for the book itself. That’s certainly the case with Camus’s existentialist classic The Stranger.** You would do well to find a more detached and chilling line than Meursault's ‘Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure’

And they have been stingy with their quotation from the King James Bible, quoting only the first sentence and omitting the poetically brilliant second. The first sentence is iconic; the second should stir even the most secular heart:

‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’

**I’ve always thought George W. Bush unfairly maligned. But when he named The Stranger — a book about a man who, with scant provocation, kills an Arab and feels no remorse — as his summer read in 2006 I began to wonder.

How to Begin...

These are apparently the 100 best opening lines in literature. Good to see Bellow's Herzog, but scandalously no mention of his epic bildungsroman The Adventures of Augie March, which boasts, to my mind, the greatest opening salvo of them all:

I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber city – and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.

The master at work: a manuscript page from The Adventures of Augie March

The Price of a Peach

We live in an Age of Price Comparison, so I was unsurprised a reader should be in touch about yesterday’s post, Daylesford: It's Love.

The soup and sandwich cost roughly £6. Give or take a few pence, that’s on par with the competition.

The price conscious customer would do well to avoid the fruit. This Spanish peach, weighing a paltry 138 grams, costs a staggering £1.32. I buy peaches very infrequently so have no idea if that’s untypical. But four 33 pence bites later it doesn’t feel like value.

I know it was bought in Belgravia. I understand it’s organic. But £1.32? For a peach? Think about that.

The Daylesford Organic Spanish peach, yours for £1.32

Incidentally, when TS Eliot wrote ‘Do I dare to eat a peach’ he was thought to be alluding to Prufrock’s feelings of sexual inadequacy, not the cost of a piece of organic fruit.

Prospects for 2012

The head coach of UK athletics, the flamboyantly named Charles van Commenee, believes we’re in danger of falling short of our medals target at the 2012 Olympics. A warning all the more humiliating when you consider we’re hoping for only one gold in track and field.

According to this study by UC3M, governments can expect to be rewarded with a gold medal for every £35 million they invest. But this paper from Dartmouth says it’s not all about direct investment; they say GDP per capita is the best indicator of who is most likely to triumph. On their model the UK over performed in both Sydney and Beijing. However if we keep improving at an average rate of 11 medals per games (my maths is suspect, but that’s my rough calculation of our improved performance from Atalanta '96 to Beijing '08), and add one more for home advantage (according to the same Dartmouth paper the host nation can expect 1.8% more medals) then we’re looking at an impressive haul of 59 medals.

It’s a shame the overwhelming (though unexplained) home advantage so prevalent in team sports, doesn’t translate to individual events.

Bradley Wiggins (above), winner of two gold medals in Beijing, has declared the Tour de France his priority over the Olympics next year, to the dismay of British Cycling.

Drugs, the Gateway Myth & Winehouse

The autopsy is not yet complete and it would be reckless to predict its outcome. Even if Amy Winehouse’s death was not caused by an overdose the drug debate, that beast that never lies idle for long, has once again been roused. Here we go again.

The plethora of statistics on drug abuse mislead as readily as they inform. Not unusually, I rely on anecdotal evidence (guilty, no doubt, of this) and I have enough friends who decided to steer clear of drugs altogether to know that drug addicts are far from passive victims of their own genes.

As I observed the drug taking habits of my peers, it became clear that those determined to indulge would not be easily deterred. Of those who set out brimming with a righteous determination to avoid drugs, many later succumbed. Not under malign peer pressure, but because they could see with their own eyes that their friends were having fun and were still alive in the morning. This crucial point is often omitted in the muddy waters of the drugs debate. On the whole, people take drugs for the same reason they drink, not through misguided Reactance, nor because they want to dice with death or break the law, but because drugs can be enjoyable. People also take drugs when they’re manically depressed or attempting suicide, but we’re warping the debate if we let ourselves believe that’s true in anything close to the majority of cases.

Those determined to make the penalties of using cannabis more severe cite its role as the ‘gateway’ drug. It's a redundant argument. Whilst it’s true I know no one who graduated directly from Stella Artois to crack cocaine, the idea that cannabis is the first station on a line that includes cocaine, ecstasy and heroine and terminates at early death simply isn’t borne out by the facts.

Yes, the majority of habitual drug takers began by smoking cannabis, but a minute proportion go on to become full blow addicts. Such is the stigma and clouded thinking around drugs that those who would usually be proponents of free will, who place such value on individual choice and responsibility in other aspects of life, are curiously willing to abandon the principle when it comes to drugs. There are countless places along the way to withdraw, to say no more, to resist something harder. When it comes to drug use I suspect those who campaign for a so-called ‘zero-tolerance’ approach are guilty of a focusing effect. It is death that makes the headlines. Besides, it appears to me that stricter controls on cannabis push the young into the arms of criminal dealers who have a vested interest in seeing them hooked on something genuinely lethal.

Daylesford: It’s Love

Anyone who works in an office will be familiar with the euphoria as lunchtime nears. The mood lightens and the morning’s misgivings give way to more peaceable and contented thoughts. But the joy is tinged with anguish about what to eat, and where. As the clock strikes one, the grim prospect of the queue at Pret a Manger beckons.

For months my colleague Eliza has urged me to try the soup at Daylesford Organic. Reluctant to abandon my long-standing and happy relationship with Waitrose’s Caesar salad, a fixation that lasted six months, I kept finding excuses. That was until last Tuesday, when I threw caution to the wind.

Reader, I’m addicted. For five straight days lunch has consisted of cool pea and mint soup with a salmon sandwich of pumpernickel bread. They’re embarrassingly generous with the salmon and the bread is all one could wish bread to be.

I know it’s early days, but the sterile stench and yelping staff of Pret are a distant memory.

The pea and mint soup is served with a wooden spoon

The salmon sandwich is made with pumpernickel bread

Flip-flops and the Feet of Men

Do the seemingly endless clouds of this wet summer have a silver lining? The cold has meant their is less skin on display. Not just any skin, but feet. And not just any feet, but the feet of my fellow men.

Lets start at the beginning. In the past, men’s feet were so seldom on display that their neglect never much mattered. Men who wore sandals were mocked. Rubber sandals were worn in campsite showers to prevent the spread of verrucas. Socks were removed at bath time and before bed.

Sadly, in recent years, the flip-flop has migrated from its natural (and rightful) home, the beach, and has for many become the summer shoe of choice. Yet however sartorially deplorable the flip-flop may be, and it is a harrowing indictment of our aesthetic sensibilities, it is not the flip-flop itself that is the cause of my ire. Taken alone, the flip-flop is an ugly but inoffensive thing.

The trouble is feet. Some men’s feet are unsightly. The terrible trio of hair, dead skin and untended toenail is a deeply unpleasant sight. Men who devote a considerable amount of time to shaving and moisturising and otherwise treating their face – the cosmetics industry like to call it ‘male grooming’ or 'manscaping'– believe their feet, for some unfathomable reason, to be out-of-bounds. If men’s feet must be exposed in public (and I am yet to hear a convincing argument why they should be granted such freedom) then lavish them with the attention devoted to other exposed parts.

Bad idea: worn with jeans the foot is given even greater prominence

Otherwise, keep them on the beach and away from restaurants, offices, lecture halls and other confined spaces where it’s a nuisance to have to conscientiously avert our eyes. The rise of exposed, ill-kept feet is symptomatic of a wider trend in society, a selfish streak that promotes your own comfort above others. As with talking loudly into a mobile phone on a bus or train, it demonstrates an obliviousness to the senses of those around you. One an assault on the ears, the other on the eyes, but both borne from the death of shame and the perverse, self-gratifying pleasure taken in doing what you want (perpetrators call it being 'authentic' or 'real' or 'true to yourself') at the expense of others.

I’ve heard it said that on hot summer days flip-flops are more comfortable than shoes. That might be so, and were we in Africa or some other stifling spot I would positively encourage flip-flop wearing, but to wear shoes on a British summer day is not that unbearable. It’s no great hardship. The continued resurgence of the docksider (or ‘deck shoe’) and this summers craze for espadrilles are to be welcomed. The espadrille has its flaws, but it conceals everything the flip-flop so callously exposes.

Amy Winehouse

The death of Amy Winehouse is tragic, as is the death of any 27-year-old*. But the disingenuous clamour to say something profound has lead to a lot of nonsense being spoken. On the news yesterday they were talking of a girl ‘petrified by her own talent’ and ‘haunted by her voice’, as though she had a divine gift that became a burden too heavy to bare. The truth is more tragic: her death was not inevitable or pre-ordained. Her self-destructive behaviour was well-documented by the tabloids that now head the mourning procession. In the aftermath of a death, it is easier to talk of a ‘tortured genius’ than of a drug addict, which seems to apportion blame. Perversely, the mourners are leaving bottles of alcohol outside her flat. A tribute The Times calls ‘ill-judged’. I would go further, and suggest it’s worrying that her young fans, in attempting to celebrate her life, are vaunting the very things that contributed to her downfall. It was her talent that mattered, and still does.

*Am I alone in finding the near-reverential tones in which ‘club 27’ is spoken of grotesque?

A Very Social Summer

The British summer is littered with sporting occasions that are really no such thing. Ascot, Wimbledon, Henley, Lords, they’re all an excuse for a day out.

Far from the distractions of home, the Warner stand at Lords is a wonderful place to read the Sunday papers. I spent a day at Royal Ascot admiring hats and losing money, with only a cursory glance at the Racing Post. A friend of mine makes a point each year of quizzing his mother as she sets off for the Royal Regatta. Who does she fancy in The Princess Grace Challenge Cup? How are the British men’s fours shaping up for the Olympics? Of course she hasn’t a clue, but why should she?

Wimbledon is the worst of all – the fetishistic fascination with strawberries and cream, the incessant harping-on about heritage, the line judges dressed as (bad) Bertie Wooster impersonators, the faux blitz-spirit-infused camaraderie when it starts to rain. Come Wimbledon fortnight, friends you never suspected of having the remotest interest in tennis willingly queue all night for a glimpse of Centre Court and are all too eager to pontificate on the sudden reemergence of del Potro in the ATP top twenty and what it really means. Barely two months later they’re not ke­­en for a wager on the Cincinnati Masters.

No harm is really done by these annual, fleeting associations with sport, except to sport itself. You don’t raise interest or participation by hosting an increasingly exclusive jamboree year after year, and these events undermine themselves by doing so. In the long run it’s the sport that suffers.

Look at Your Man

Ghana & Intolerance

This news from Ghana is the latest in a deeply worrying trend: the rise of politically sanctioned homophobia in Africa. We don't hesitate to criticise Islam for its many prejudices, but this hatred, it appears, has its origins in Christian belief. It is also worth noting that the suspected perpetrator of the atrocities in Norway yesterday (acts so repugnant and horrifying they almost defy description) is reported to be a Christian fundamentalist.

I'm not religious**, and so may never understand how commonly held beliefs can so easily warp or mutate, and in so doing lead to slaughter and state-approved prejuidice. Yesterdays events in Norway were beyond tragic. The situation in Ghana is deeply worrying. In Malawi, aid donors threatened withdrawal in order to procure a pardon for two men jailed for homosexuality. The idea of withdrawing aid because a country will not conform to our concepts of tolerance seems drastic (and is controversial) but our responsibility should be to combat such blatantly medieval and hatful dogma wherever we find it.

---------

**I was baptized, though never confirmed, into the most non-committal, wishy-washy church of them all, the Church of England. If, as an unbeliever, I am forced to express an opinion on religious belief, I turn to John Henry Newman's instructions for the unbelieveing gentleman:

'If he is an unbeliever, he will be too profound and large-minded to ridicule religion or to act against it; he is too wise to be a dogmatist or fanatic....He respects piety and devotion; he even supports institutions as venerable, beautiful, or useful, to which he does not assent....and it contents him to decline its mysteries without assailing or denouncing them.'

It is worth reading the definition of a gentleman from Newman's The Idea of a University.

Phone Coverage

After the excellent Deborah Orr, an article by Sebastian Shakespeare yesterday to make the blood simmer. The phone hacking scandal, he says, is dominating the news agenda at the direct expense of the famine in Somalia. It's true that were there no hacking scandal the famine would be more widely (though perhaps no better) reported, but does that make us insular, as he suggests? There's a worthwhile debate to be had about the diminishing coverage of international news in the print media, but the truth is there is almost always a story that invloves more sorrow, hardship and death in another corner of the globe, and it's beyond hopeful (verging on the utopian, even) to imagine that these often tragic situations will be given perpetual prominance over the domestic. In a perfect world all eyes would be trained on Somalia and our resources dedicated to lifting the famine there, but such wishes ignore that even in a global age our concerns remain alarmingly local.

Besides, can newspapers really be blamed for obsessing over the downfall of their biggest rival? Only 6% of us receive the majority of our news from the papers. It is the BBC, whose reporting of the hacking scandal has been woeful, that has questions to answer.

News of the World

This seems to be a common sentiment when lamenting the closure of The News of the World:

It's an outrage that honest journalists have lost their jobs. No one involved in phone-hacking was any longer at The News of the World...some of these journalists had worked at the paper for twenty years.

A slight contradiction?

Draft Cover 2

A draft cover for Berlin Cantata, a novel set in Berlin shortly after the fall

of the Berlin Wall. Published March 2012.

At the Cinema, The Tree of Life

The Tree of Life is hard to pin down, at heart it is the story of a family in 1950s Texas. Jessica Chastain plays a stupefyingly beautiful, ethereal, angelic and fragile mother and Brad Pitt a stern, authoritarian father.

Our presumptions are challenged in the usual way: the father clearly loves his sons, is devoted to them, and the mother’s ethereal nature seems to indulge them, but on the whole we are left with an all too recognizable conflict, the father representing the harshness of nature and experience in a fallen world, the mother’s tenderness standing for love, grace and innocence. Being dismissive, we could say The Tree of Love is an elegant and beguiling (and somewhat overblown) rehash of the oldest conflict in the book, that of father vs mother and their competing natures. Being kind, it is a courageous and largely successful attempt to ask grand and unanswerable metaphysical questions about the nature of life on earth, family, childhood and a whole lot more; a film that seems to say we should be enthralled that anything exists, let alone that we exist, here and now. It is clear from the beginning that one of the sons (there are three) will die. Spliced throughout the film are vertiginously scenes in which Sean Penn — as the family’s eldest son grown old and now an architect in a very urban setting from which all nature seems to have been banished and, we assume, demolished — stares out of office windows and rides in glass lifts. At once melancholic and frenzied, he is carrying a burden, perhaps prolonged or delayed grief over the death of his brother. It is worth seeing the film for the relationship between the brothers alone, a precise and moving examination of sibling love, cruelty and loyalty.

But before any of this gets going we’re subjected to a half-hour sequence on the origins of life, through the big bang and the age of dinosaurs. It’s overwhelmingly powerful cinema, a beguiling and majestic nature film unleashed across the big screen. I might have enjoyed it more if I’d know it was coming and it was spoiled by people walking out – it was not just that they walked across the screen but that I couldn't help wondering why they were leaving. Ten or so must have walked out within the first hour, but there was applause at the end too**, though it’s fleeting nature suggested it might have been intended ironically.

**If reviewers are to be believed, films premièring at Cannes are often applauded as the credits roll. This only ever makes sense if an actor or the director are in the room to witness your appreciation. There is little that aggravates me more than a football supporter watching a match in a pub (or even at home, come to that) and applauding a substitute off the pitch. You’re showing your appreciation to someone who cannot possibly hear you. I’m all for spontaneous moments of celebration and outrage, but why act as though you’re at the game when you aren’t? I imagine it’s the fallacy that says only real fans go to the game, so to be a real fan you must behave as though you’re in the stadium. Or at least your behaviour should suggest that you’re usually at the game but couldn’t make it today because…you’re in the pub.

More Hacking

Staying with the base and primitive emotions that encourage us to detest the rich and powerful, Deborah Orr in The Guardian (in a good article on the deeper cultural malaise of which hacking was but a part) says that: ‘…for many years there has been widespread acquiescence to the idea that it's reasonable, even necessary, to punish imperfect humans for their success or wealth.’ She makes other prescient points, most importantly about the way we, as readers, legitimised the sickening behaviour of newspapers by allowing them to expose things which we had no business knowing.

Timothy Garton Ash is also good on what the long-term implications could (and should) be.

DSK & The Rape of Innocence

Some of the journalists who set about convicting Strauss-Khan in print in the hours and days after his arrest in New York included a cursory 'of course he's innocent until proven guilty'. Others did not even manage that. It's worth reading Theodore Dalrymple on the prejudices and double standards involved in the arrest and subsequent outcry.

'If it [the trial] does collapse, a lot of people will have to re-arrange their memories to demonstrate, both to themselves and to others, that they had been right about the whole business from the very beginning, and had always smelt a rat.....Hatred of the powerful, supposedly because of love of justice, is therefore not in itself a noble or a good emotion. In essence, it appeals to the same baseness, and calls for the same low, primitive and visceral reactions, as hatred of foreigners and immigrants.'

A Noble Mien

It's Mr Darcy's 'handsome features and noble mien' that make him the star attraction at the Lucas's ball in Pride and Prejudice. That, and the small matter of his 'having ten thousand a year'. Using the National Archives Website we can see why he was such a catch. In today's money that's an annual income of just under £350,000. Add to that whatever he would be making from CAP (I guess Pemberley had a few farms) and he'd be doing well.

Given the fuss over the private schooling of our politicians you'd think privilege was something new to politics. But Lord Salisbury, prime minister at the turn of the last century, had a fortune of £6 million. Today that would be almost £350 million. With that sort of fortune you're pretty incorruptible.

Murdoch before the select committee

An interesting post from Prospect on the passing-up of a unique opportunity yesterday.

On Shopping for Clothes

When approached in shops I’m a “thanks, I’m just looking” man. A curious thing to say – does anyone go shopping just to look? – but it’s the easiest way to fend-off the unwanted attentions of ever-zealous shop assistants. Their job is to sell you things, so all attempts at lighthearted and convivial banter are doomed; you’re left waiting for the pleasantries and sly ingratiation to end and the sales assault to begin. It’s the same feeling when harangued with a breathless sob story about a lost wallet, you wish they’d cut to the chase and just ask for some money.

“Looking for another chambray?” I was asked whilst browsing in a shop last week. Convinced I didn’t own a ‘chambray’ anything, and intrigued by what being a chambray-wearer might imply, I replied “a what?” He was referring to my shirt. My few shirts (pictured below) which could forgivably be misdescribed as chambrays are, if we’re going to be strict about it, plain old denim. But any old fool knows denim. Referring to it as ‘chambray’ he meant to parade his expertise. I’m worried by this trend among high-street retailers to provide allegedly knowledgeable ‘stylists’ or ‘personal shoppers’. We’re led to believe they know something we don't, that they have a 'good eye', or maybe that they've undergone some sort of training that qualifies them to advise us on the merits of the 'off white' chino over the 'stone'. But the very idea of a shop assistant with questionable taste fobbing-off unwanted overstock by pretending it complements my skin tone is absurd and infuriating. I wonder how many people are lulled into a lavish spree and then in the hushed still of home, away from the frenzied compliments, swooning adoration and egging-on, look in the mirror and think not only what do I look like, but who?

My worst shop experience was in Reiss. I was paying for a pair trousers when the man behind the till said: “You need a shirt too”. If this was a command it was out of place. If a comment on the shirt I was wearing, it was insulting and unwarranted. I can’t remember how I replied (probably “no thank you”) but it was one of those remarks that grates the more you think about it. By evening I was apoplectic.

What I’m Reading 2

Encouraged by reviews that suggest there is less sex than in his previous novels, I have started Alan Hollinghurt’s The Stranger’s Child. The sex has always seemed essential with Hollinghurst so it’ll be interesting to see how he does without it, or with less of it. Not a page went by in The Swimming Pool Library without a swelling crotch (or two) and there can be very few more highly sexed men in literature than the young aesthete narrator William Beckwith, for whom the word promiscuous doesn’t do the remotest justice.

With a less gifted writer so much sex would get in the way, but the brilliance of Hollinghurst is that the hunt for sex and the quest for love are equally potent, and though intertwined the latter somehow survives unsullied. It would be a great shame to allow the sheer volume of sodomitical goings-on to deter you from reading TSPL, because between the incessant buggery is a brilliant, elegiac portrait of the troublingly nostalgic friendship between Beckwith and the his wry, balding, sentimental school friend James Brook. Brook is one of literature’s great fringe characters. Posed in deliberate opposition to Beckwith, with his vitality and vigor, Brook is fading and alone:

‘…it’s all very well being ironic, but then it keeps coming over me that no one wants me, the summer’s burning away, and no one makes a move for me, I don’t preoccupy anyone.’

And then the moment, underlined in my volume, when the mysterious Lord Nantwich (who, at the beginning of the book, Beckwith resuscitates in a public lavatory when the Peer suffers a heart attack whilst cottaging) returns home with flowers to be told by his lover and manservant Taha that he is to marry a woman:

‘So the Chrysanthemums – in that way that inanimate things have of implicating themselves in moments of crisis - swam before my eyes like emblems of his years of fidelity, and festive tokens of his future…now heartlessly splendid’.

At the Royal Academy

Concerning the exhibition of Hungarian photography at RA I don’t have a lot to say, other than that Robert Capa’s notoriety is well deserved. The image that springs to mind with Capa is Death of a Loyalist Militiaman, but the range of his photographs included show him to have been as adroit on the beaches of Normandy as he was adept in the studio or on the street. His preeminence among the distinguished group exhibited here –including Moholy-Nagy and Brassaï - is quickly apparent.

‘May you live in interesting times’ is said to be a Chinese curse. Whether it is or not is a matter of some dispute. The sentiment stands, however, in the case of 20th century Hungary, which could be said to be both interesting and pretty hellish. The overriding impression is that from WWI to the break-up of the Soviet Union, Hungary was a tumultuous and for the most part unenviable place to live.

One more thing about Capa. It was he who said: "If your photographs aren't good enough, you're not close enough." Advice more pertinent than ever as we labor under the pretence that the zoom lens has done away with the imperative for getting close.

There is always one picture that holds you a little longer than the others. For me it was Kertész’s stunning Washington Square (pictured).