Thursday, June 9, 2011

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.

3 comments:

Chad Taylor said...

The Meltdown festival is always good. I saw the one with Lou Reed: just the right mix of artiness and accessibility.

Denis said...

There is a belief that Osama spent a bit long in front of the telly entranched by Pippa's butt and by Beatrice's loony hat. This distracted him from seeing chaps in black arriving and didn't leave him enough time to hide the porn.

Stephen Stratford said...

I can understand the Pippa element but not the Beatrice. But given where he was livin', I guess he had to take his pleasure where he could.