What I’m reading

Ally Mullord is not the first person to write in praise of Pippa Middleton’s derriere, but she comes at it, as it were, from a unique angle, that of the potato chip.

Howard Jacobson, winner of the 2010 Man Booker prize, weighs in on the great Callil-Roth debate:

No one can make you laugh, and if you are a woman born in Melbourne in the late 1930s no one should be so sadistic as to try.

My favourite living composer Harrison Birtwistle has a new album of big orchestral pieces out, Night’s Black Bird: it’s fantastic. So of course the Daily Telegraph asks him about pop music.

Frederic Raphael on David Pryce-Jones’s Treason of the Heart: From Thomas Paine to Kim Philby in the Literary Review:

With the anecdotal sparkle and accurate animus of a moralist who never flinches from naming names, Pryce-Jones arraigns scores of men and women – Beatrice Webb the cleverest, Doris Lessing the most smug – who have, for a variety of motives, embraced barbaric causes at the expense of common decency. [. . . .]

Celebrities jostle each other in order to show deference to shits and charlatans in alien costume. [. . . .] Sir Charles Trevelyan was living on a 13,000 acre estate, its gates decorated with the hammer and sickle, when in January 1939 he told Stalin that he “owed his ascendancy to the confidence of a free and democratic people”; Joseph Needham, Master of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, fawned on Mao; Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol College, Oxford, said that Stalin’s Terror was “non-violent” and to the end of his distinguished, duplicitous life queried whether the Gulag ever existed.