In Henley at Jonkers, a very lovely Antiquarian bookshop in the High Street, just opposite the grave of Dusty Springfield, I picked up an old paperback edition of this David Hughes book. I knew him a little in Provence in the old days with my novelist friend Earl Thompson and I enjoyed his novels (The Pork Butcher.) He was married to Mai Zetterling for nineteen years, and I may also have met him through Gerald Durrell with whom we socialized a little in the early seventies. In fact he wrote a memoir of Gerry which I have ordered through Alibris. He was our host when Python filmed one of the later Flying Circus series in Jersey, where he had a spectacular zoo and where we adopted a spectacled bear. I found the book itself engaging, and then less so.

Do you have those books that you always pick up and start to read and then go, hang on I already read that. That’s why I keep a reading list. But some, like this one, I remember that I bailed about the same time as I just did again. Nothing particularly wrong. Just ungrabbed I guess. Think it might have been a Mister B’s which I picked up last year, and then picked up again this year! Well if I did I obviously didn’t enter it, sometimes I don’t if I don’t get very far. Sorry B keepers.

Essays. With a pang I noticed that he was still alive and writing this, this time last year. Of course the great thing about writers is that they stay alive as long as there are readers…I was intrigued by his essay on Lolita, in a review of Reading Lolita in Tehran, in which he rates it even higher than I do, and discusses it finely, and compatibly with my own views…

I’ve also lost my notes on this brilliant book about the scoundrel Rupert Murdoch’s empire and his cynical and self-important manipulation of the British Press, Police and Politicians. The book is an eye opener, revealing just how sinister and deeply corrupting the whole phone tapping thing became. The News of the World with their God given right to hound and bully people, was always a nasty rag: in the Fifties exposing sex amongst the middle classes and the endless naughty vicars who in those more innocent days had sex only with young women. Of course they hounded gays, but they were asking for it weren’t they? Often they hounded people to death. Early on they discovered just how cheap it is to bribe policemen, Detective ranks particularly, and in the Sixties they happily collaborated with the Metropolitan Police busting pop stars for possessing grass and helping to plant drug evidence to ensure conviction for The Stones and some Beatles. With the coming of Murdoch the scene changed. Suddenly he had five newspapers and they could change Governments. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” in the famous phrase of Baron Acton¸ but I prefer the finer quote from Stanley Baldwin attacking Lord Beaverbrook and Lord Rothermere (themselves the leading press barons of his day) in a phrase suggested by his cousin Rudyard Kipling: “What the proprietorship of these papers is aiming at is power, and power without responsibility — the prerogative of the harlot through the ages.” During the Seventies there were legendary tales of fearless News of the World reporters sexually entrapping celebs and politicians in pubs and clubs and hotel rooms. I once watched two young ladies making out in the Gents at a London club, attempting to seduce a famous footballer friend of mine, who shall remain blameless, as he rolled his eyes and mentioned the name of the Publicist (Max Clifford) who was paying these girls to entrap anyone who wandered in for a quiet piss. How English is all this? Hypocritical. Devious. Yes, very English. The pursuit of unhappiness seems to be the watchword of the British Press, who are even more depressing than the English weather. Read this book and be very very concerned that the man who owns Fox News did this.

I’m sure I wrote something about my experience of reading this book in early summer, about my excitement, my anticipation, and my disappointment that this was not as good as other Cheevers, nor approaching the maturity of Bullet Park, and about my continually returning to pick up the tale, but if I did I cannot find the words, and must have recourse to Dave Eggers charming introduction. Of course Eggers would love Cheever, as I believe does Michael Chabon, but then who does not, who could not? (Probably a lot of clod hopping best sellers) So you must excuse me, that I cannot wholeheartedly recommend this tale, a sequel in the sense of recurring characters, and that I have lost my notes where I’m sure I made many sensible and cogent observations, only to leave you with this pale wreath of memory.

Most books end badly. I don’t mean their events, I mean their writing. It requires a great deal of stamina to finish a book, and many authors fall off towards the end. I found this as true of Mansfield Park as this book. (Perhaps this thought comes from Aspects of the Novel by E.M Forster?) I think pervasive use of editors by Americans writers helps prevent it more than their English equivalents. This is a mostly very interesting book about the first two Georges, their courts, their wives and their mistresses, with some delightful tales, and quite a bit of tattle.

Imagine the worst person in the world. Martin Amis has written him. A nightmare character with no redeeming features. A man so vile you have to read his exploits behind your hands, as you avert your eyes from the worst violence in movies. Then Amis plays the gag. He gives him all the money in the world. While inside prison he wins the lottery and becomes intensely rich. This is indubitably funny. He gives Asbo a budding young intellectual nephew for a companion and surrogate son, stirs and it becomes an explosive brew. Not pleasant, but decidedly funny. Not so much Lucky Jim as Lucky Bastard. He has portrayed the worst sociopath since Stalin. This man is a Borderline and has no feelings for anyone at all. Of course in the end he is betrayed by his utter lack of feeling, “who let the dog’s in?” In his unspeakable cruelty to Marlon, his envious attempt to hurt the innocents who have found love and form a family reminded me of Dickens long before I realised Martin Amis was well ahead of me with his Carkery Lane and Speers Central. But why do the British press hate him so? Well partly because he subtitles this “State of England” and also perhaps because this portrait of an exploiter with no feelings is actually an intimate view of the Press itself, snarling with impotent rage. I am glad he has successfully escaped the country. It seems the only sensible way to avoid the Rottweiler’s of Wapping. They savage his work apparently, though it’s hard for me to believe that. They even savage his dentistry. They eat their young. Must it become a land fit only for the mediocre?

Great opening chapters state his theme, the growth of consciousness of the real, and our perception of the Universe and how we are growing smaller and smaller as our knowledge expands beyond the stars and the galaxies to the very nature of the Universe itself. Nice to be reading under the whirling summer Milky Way with the lyrics of the Galaxy Song on my mind, and my lovely task to provide new lyrics for Professor Brian Cox, a sequel to the original song, including the immense dimensions of the whole unlikely exploding thing in which we find ourselves. In 1981, when I began to write that song, the astronomical distances and speeds mentioned in the lyrics were all considered scientifically accurate, now, of course, we have had thirty years of expanding scientific research and observation and I have had to alter the words to correspond with our new estimate of the extreme distances in the Galaxy and our ever expanding Universe, not to mention the possibility of a multi-verse, not a day goes by without us getting smaller and smaller. So far from the medieval picture of us as at the centre of the heavens, with everything revolving around our fixed planet, we now find ourselves thrust ever farther from the enormity of the Universe, and now we know we are only at the extreme edge of a thing so immense that it is almost impossible to conceive. Here are some new “facts” that I pulled out of David Eagelman’s book about the brain: There are 500 million Galaxy groups, 10 billion large Galaxies, 100 billion dwarf Galaxies, 2,000 billion billion suns. The visible Universe is 15 billion light years across and may itself be just a small speck in the total Universe…think of that on your way to the mall, and, of course, I bet you anything in thirty years you will have to update all these figures…although I alas will have to leave that task to you.

I was gob smacked by this. The extraordinarily confident prose, such maturity of thought and expression in one so young completely took me by surprise. I know precisely where it left me though. The simple tale took a sudden left turn into a narrative by someone else, with the story of the unkillable man, and I felt the whole air go out of the book. I persisted, but so did she, so though I intend to return and see what happens after that seismic shift, I have been in no hurry to do so.

The Story of America’s most Secretive Religion. Downloaded. This is a less than interesting tale. If anything an illustration of how easily mankind is misled, or the prevailing appeal of fascism. If a minor con man and bullshit artist like L. Ron Hubbard can get anyway with starting a religion so evidently stupid as Scientology one wonders what hope there is for mankind. But then of course all religions require the willing consent of the deceived. I personally believe in the separation of Church and planet. That these con men should be entitled to tax relief is shameful. The paranoid who are everywhere, are at the mercy of manipulatory idiots like this. It’s a Miscavidge of Justice. A Cruise missal.

I found the argument compelling, but repetitive. An important book, and at its finest at the beginning where he argues the case for the reasons for the survival of Western culture, at the expense of other highly evolved human societies who could not cope with the first encounter with the heavily armed Europeans.

This is a very funny book. Made me laugh out loud. Genuinely, uproariously funny expose of the pretensions and bollocks of the advertising world, which kept me happily engaged. But underneath the hilarious and wonderful comedy he also wants to write a serious book, about a dead bullying father, and while forgiveness of a cruel parent, and honouring his unpleasant father’s wishes to be buried at sea in Pearl Harbor provides him with a plot, we rather shamefully just want more of the drop dead funny stuff about all the mad people who work in advertising and their side-splitting attempts to film a Snugglies diaper commercial in LA. It it seems to me particularly difficult to meld the two forms, or you have to be a far more serious writer. It’s as if Waugh tried to combine The Loved One with Brideshead, the comedy kills the sentimental. Most of the plot beats we do see coming, and his protagonist seems to be the only one in the book who hasn’t noticed his love for Phoebe, so while we forgive him for not bringing the book home quicker, it cannot compare to a real novel. I have to reveal that he sent me the book for a jacket quote, which I was happy to give.

A short monograph on Bin Laden. A brief and brilliant polemic exposing the pathetic pretensions of this vain and foolish enemy of the people, responsible for so many deaths. A short discourse on evil. And as usual Hitchens is not afraid to call a spade a spade. A Kindle Single, read Online on I Pad, indeed not much longer than an article. Here is the conclusion. “The war against superstition and the totalitarian mentality is an endless war. In protean forms, it is fought and refought in every country and every generation. In bin Ladenism we confront again the awful combination of the highly authoritarian personality with the chaotically nihilist and anarchic one…but it is in this struggle that we develop the muscles and sinews that enable us to defend civilization, and the moral courage to name it as something worth fighting for. As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden’s carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.”

If you like reading and you love books, and you must because otherwise why would you be here, then you will love this one. Almost exactly my contemporary, though she went to Kings London, where I might have gone for I was offered a place, she like me, encountered D. H. Forster and experienced the same thrill and total disbelief that he could be possibly alive. Like me she enjoyed meeting the insanely beautiful and slightly arrogant Bruce Chatwin, and like me her childhood love for reading has informed and enriched her life. This book is a trip through her own library, a delightful, and utterly memorable readers memoir, and she says many thoughtful, true, and eminently quotable things about the writers she met, and their books. For instance this on Dickens, (the whole paragraph is quotable) “..his literary imagination was the greatest ever, his world of teeming life is as real as has ever been invented, his conscience, his passion for the underdog, the poor, the cheated, the humiliated are god-like. He created an array of varied, vibrant, living, breathing men and women and children that is breath-taking in its scope. His scenes are painted like those of an Old Master, in vivid colour and richness on huge canvasses.” A quick flip through these pages makes you want to read and re-read almost everything she mentions. Enjoy it. She made me slightly ashamed I had discarded Heart of the Matter recently, but then I felt better when she confessed she couldn’t stand Jane Austen. It reminds you that reading is not an exact science and that the Heisenberg principle applies, the position of the observer alters everything. (I apologise to scientists if I have this wrong. I have a very uncertain grasp of the uncertainty theory and sometimes confuse Pavlov’s dogs with Schrödinger’s cat, but then you see, I am only a comedian and not a scientific vet.) I picked this up in Toppings, which is another excellent bookshop in Bath, how exceedingly fortunate they are to have Mr B's and Toppings and countless little second hand shops, including a great one down by the railway station whose name I have shamefully forgotten. When I tell people I come to Bath to buy books they look at me strangely, but it's true. I ship them home in tons. Bath is the sort of place that makes me miss England, but the weather is wet enough to fill a battleship of bath-tubs, and that soggy deflated feeling of incessant rain in June, is what makes me glad I left.

This theme of play acting and real behaviour is co-incidentally present in another excellent book I have just been reading: this new one from William Boyd. The theme of the book is the river of sex, which flows as strongly in London as in Vienna. The protagonist Lysander is not only an actor, he is also the son of a famous actor, with a Viennese mother. He is fleeing a fiancée, the aptly named Blanche, as he is suffering from an unusual sexual problem, Anorgasmia, the inability to achieve orgasm, and he goes to Vienna in 1913 to take the talking cure from a disciple of Freud’s, an Englishman like himself. Fortunately for him he is swiftly seduced by Hettie Bull, the English common law wife of a Bullish Austrian sculptor called Hoff, whom he meets at his shrinks and who insists he pose in the nude for her. When he submits and visits her a blatant seduction swiftly proves his condition is no longer a problem. His therapist suggests his own kind of cure, which is a re-programming therapy, reconfiguring in the mind a convincing version of what never happened, which in a way is what acting is all about. And, for that matter, novel writing. So we are somewhere between Stanislavski and Freud, with references to the new realism in sexual writing (Miss Julie) which Lysander is acting, as well as Angelo in Much Ado, the most sexual of Shakespeare’s plays. His mistress also appears naked on stage in scandalised Vienna in Andromeda and Perseus. Other problems swiftly follow from the affair with his pretty mistress, which I am not going to spoil for you, for this is a fine book and you will like it. I find William Boyd writes the best sex scenes of any living novelist, and dead, for that matter. He seems to get it exactly right, just the correct amount of quirkiness that drives our sex motors, without ever straying into mawkishness or pornography. The book itself turns into a pretty fair thriller, where Lysander becomes a kind of post-modern Richard Hannay, with shady encounters with espionage figures almost from the pages of John Le Carré.

Well actually I began reading this in California, because I was heading for Bath, and there is something wonderfully appropriate about reading Jane Austen in Bath, but I finished it in Venice, which is strangely inappropriate, Venetian society being almost the polar opposite of Jane Austen’s Bath. Literature is attempting to reveal what it is like to be human at a certain period of time, and this novel certainly does that. It is a comedy of manners. In Jane Austen novels it is vitally important in society how people behave (correctly) and feel (appropriately) and act (not at all). These manners are imposed by society and real people often behave differently, hence the famous irony which is the gap between what is spoken and what is felt. Perception and reality. Fanny Price, though poor, has correct instincts, she thinks and feels correctly, sees people for who and what they are, without standing up to them until pushed. She is the classic “fish out of water” adopted by, though not part of society and in the world around her people are estranged from their emotions. Indeed giving in to emotion is seen as very dangerous. When they begin to put on a play this gap is exposed, hence the brilliance of the scenes of the rehearsals at Mansfield Park, which is a thoroughly appropriate metaphor as they are permitted to act in a different, and less appropriate way. That is why the play is seen as dangerous, and “acting” inimical and dangerous to society. These scenes are the emotional heart of the book and provides the dramatic climax to the first half of the book with the return of the father from the West Indies, and his angry dismissal of the play. Seems to me that all that follows, when Fanny moves to Portsmouth, (Cinderella returns to her hovel) the heart goes out of the book, and, as Nabokov notes, the novel finally becomes epistolary where everything is revealed at second hand. Since we have been waiting for something dramatic to happen for several excruciating chapters it is deeply frustrating and surprising that a book ostensibly about acting, and acting inappropriately, should have so much drama happen entirely off stage. In particular the revelation that Mr Crawford is a shit and Maria vain and foolish, is achieved by having the pair simply, and conveniently, and adulterously run away together off stage. This violently dramatic conclusion which we learn about only through letters, leads to the inevitable denouement where Edmund realises he is meant for Fanny Price (duh). Since of all Jane Austen’s heroines Fanny Price is the closest to the author’s heart and mind as to be virtually an idealised self-portrait, one may speculate that Austen herself is the victim of unrequited love, which may account for the false feeling one gets about the enforced happy conclusion which was missing in her own life. But with the great scenes of the play, this is still a half way great novel.