“Dinner with Harold (Pinter) and Antonia (Fraser). Harold told us of their first night of love, when the decision to start the affair was taken. He decided to express the depth of his feeling by reading her some of his poems. Antonia arrives, sits in an armchair. Harold reads with the most painstaking attention to tone and phrasing and effect. He looks up. Antonia is asleep”
As related in John Fowles’s Journals, Volume II
Pollyanna award for irrepressible cheeriness
“Don’t go on holiday: it will be hot and there will be hordes of people there who have brought their children. The children will cry and vomit while the parents discover their marital difficulties are only exacerbated by sangria and having to be with each other 24 hours a day. The parents will then cry and vomit — loudly, mainly against the walls of your bedroom.
Don’t go to Europe. The people will be too attractive and culturally mature and you will feel awkward unless you lie in a sack in a ditch and yell ‘I’m sorry!’ for the duration of your stay.
Don’t go anywhere poor. Strangers will give you things and ask you to share your home. This will make you feel like a filthy imperialist scumbag.
Don’t go to America. It will make you feel morally superior and that may well lead to your arrest”
AL Kennedy’s travel tips, in the Observer’s Escape section
With friends like these award
“To those of us who harbour some affection for him [his behaviour] has had one overwhelming consequence: a man blessed with high intelligence and great abilities has, through moral failure and self-indulgence, now largely ceased to be taken seriously in public life”
Simon Heffer reviewing a biography of Boris Johnson, his former Spectator boss
Best literary personal ad
“Allele, anatta, arrear, arrere, bedded, bettee, breere, caccap, ceesse, cobbob, cocoon, deesse, dolool, doodad, effere, emmele, emmene, ennean, essede, feyffe, gaggee, giggit, googol, gregge, hammam, hummum, hubbub, jettee, kokoon, lessee, lesses, mammal, mammee, mossoo, mutuum, nerrer, ossous, pazazz, pepper, perree, pippin, powwow, reeder, reefer, reeffe, refeff, retree, seasse, secess, seesen, sensse, sessle, settee, sissoo, tattee, tattoo, tedded, teerer, teeter, teethe, terrer, testee, tethee, tetter, tittee, treete, unnung, veerer, weeded, zaarra. Six-letter words with one occurrence of one letter, two occurrences of another letter and three occurrences of another letter. By Christ, I need a woman. I’m 41, but if you’ve got a pulse, cable TV and a smoothie-maker you’ll do. Box no 4290”
From They Call Me Naughty Lola: The London Review of Books Personal Ads, ed David Rose
Pot-and-kettle award
“In this age of lazy reviewing, facile judgment and inflated rhetoric, how is one to convey news of the arrival of a work of genius? This powerful, troubling, moving, profound novel is nothing less. Its architecture — more accurately: its engineering, the construction of it — is a feat of brilliance, so sustained and accurate is it; and yet this is the least of its merits. What really steals one’s breath away is its sharpness and depth of insight — a sharpness that flays, and a depth almost too vertiginous to describe — and the remorseless tragedy it unfolds, even as it makes one laugh aloud, sometimes in shock”
AC Grayling on Howard Jacobson’s novel Kalooki Nights
Least helpful contribution to a travel book
“London is what prevents me getting to London. But, as I travel, I do so in the belief that there’s somewhere truly worth arriving: London. Only rarely have I felt that I’ve got there — that I’m where it’s at, in the place to be. And although it’s taken me a while to realise it (over 10 years), this is what makes me want to keep on living here. In so many other places, you arrive and find yourself immediately there”
Toby Litt in The Rough Guide to London by the Book
Oddest authorial habit
“I’ve taken to carrying a large handkerchief around. I have a theory that, if everyone were to stop using electric blowers and paper towels to dry their hands, the planet would be saved. Trouble is, I do dry my hands on it, and I put it back in the handbag, and everything else gets damp. And if it’s forgotten about, mildew can set in. What to do? It’s a work in progress”
Margaret Atwood interviewed by Ali Smith, Harper’s Bazaar
Most puzzling passage in a biography
“Depending on her mood, she could appear flat-chested, while on other occasions the size of her breasts fuelled speculation about implants”
Barbara Amiel as described by Tom Bower in Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge
Most tortuous literary style
“[It’s as if he’s had the novel] dictated to him by aliens while being gang-probed in their space capsule”
Unnamed Private Eye critic on DBC Pierre’s Ludmila’s Broken English
Most unhelpful seasonal advice
“These books are nothing but a toxic spume thrown up by the information age and the reign of Google. Avoid them. If you receive them as gifts, reject them. Forcibly. Tear them up, cast them down, throw them in the fire”
London Evening Standard literary editor David Sexton on Christmas gift books
He knows of what he speaks awad
“Last week, my novel had its first review, in the Evening Standard. The reviewer quoted a few bits, such as “white chicks love dark cock”, and said that “as a dirty-minded description of multicultural London now, it’ll really take some beating”. Great. I always thought I was a disgusting douche-bag and now it’s official”
Nirpal Singh Dhaliwal on his novel Tourism
Most unPC sex tip
“Faking is kind to male partners . . . Otherwise they, too, may become anxious and so less able to perform. Do yourself and him a favour, sister: fake it”
Fay Weldon in What Makes Women Happy
Most besotted biographer
“Millions of us could recognise the sweet curve of her bottom in the dark. Millions more have had that palpable illusion help them make it through the night”
From Nicole Kidman by David Thomson
Most unflattering review
“Janet Street-Porter had the great good fortune to be born with looks that were exactly right for her era. When she left home in 1967, her resemblance to Plug in The Beano’s Bash Street Kids was, for the first time ever, enormously fashionable”
Christopher Hart on Fall Out by Janet Street-Porter, The Sunday Times
Suffering for his art award
“I was very worried about the story. It was incredibly difficult to do, to find the legitimacy. I was in Uruguay with my beautiful family writing about penal servitude in the Arctic Circle. Suffering is really physical and it is hard to do by the pool. For a year, I felt perfectly awful”
Martin Amis on writing House of Meetings, The Observer
Most baffling authorial crisis
“Recently, and for the first time in my life, I abandoned, not a dead thing, but a thriving novella; and I did so for reasons that were wholly extraneous. I am aware that this is hardly a tectonic event; but for me this episode was existential. In the West, writers are acclimatised to freedom — to limitless and gluttonous freedom. And I discovered something. Writing is freedom; and as soon as that freedom is in shadow, the writer can no longer proceed. The shadow, in this case, was not a fear of repercussion. It was as if, most reluctantly, I was receiving a new vibration or frequency from the planetary shimmer”
Martin Amis, in the same interview, The Observer
Worst literary humiliation
“I’m in the reading room of the British Library and I’ve just asked to see the original manuscript of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The lady on the desk says, “You do realise it’s one of our most priceless possessions?” I am wearing a heavy-duty parka, and am sweating. I have never been in the British Library before . . . I have entered what is often referred to in our house as Alan Bennett mode, characterised by the outward demonstration of inadequacy and unworthiness when standing before the edifices of the establishment. So I just sweat some more [instead of pointing out that he’s a well-known poet with a commission to translate the poem], and the lady on the desk says, ‘There aren’t many pictures in it.’ ‘There are 12 illustrations,’ I tell her, ‘I think.’ The lady says, ‘We have some nice postcards of them. You can buy them downstairs in the gift shop.’ Ten minutes later I’m on a bench at Kings Cross waiting for the next train [back to Yorkshire]. From a little bag I pull out six or seven postcards. The lady was right. They are indeed nice.”
Simon Armitage, translator of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Guardian
Swiftest volte face
“Did the young Mozart get a five-book deal for £5m when he was only 20. Course not. He was just a run-of-the-mill genius. Didn’t even play away games till he was six . . . [but] HarperCollins is reported to be paying Wayne Rooney £1m a shot for five books. He has had a long and amazing life. You couldn’t get it all into just one book”
Hunter Davies, New Statesman, February 20
“If I poured scorn, four weeks ago, on the rumoured £5m being paid to Wayne Rooney, scoffing at the idea of a 20-year-old doing five books, then I was being patronising and silly, as, of course, he is a young man of staggering genius and deserves 50 books, nay a whole library. Here’s what’s helped change my mind. I got this call from Harper-Collins, from its head of sports books, asking if I’d like to meet Wayne. I was, apparently, on a shortlist of three writers [to be Rooney’s ghost]. Off I went to meet him last Wednesday afternoon . . . Two days later, the call came. I start next week”
Hunter Davies, New Statesman, March 20
Worst sex passage
“I like the feeling of my lips being stretched, the incorporation of the chthonic male other into the mouth from which I speak, the head from which I think, the face which is my polite persona in the non-sexual intercourse of polite society”
The heroine’s musings while giving oral sex to a tennis star in Vocational Girl by Anima Mundi, “the pseudonym of one of Britain’s best-known female novelists”
Runner-up
“The junctions of her body were well signed, and his Knowledge was sufficient to hold her. Yet in the friction of their final lunge there was an anticipation of more than arrival. Their jerking bodies prefigured the bondage of shackled partners. They both sensed this and struggled to avoid it — back-pedalling into the present. Dave came in desperation . . . while the mere cessation of bucking was Michelle’s end”
From Will Self’s The Book of Dave, in which the hero is a taxi-driver
Parody of the Year
The Heart of the Mattress by Joan Bakewell
“It was in this steamy liberated atmosphere of sexual awakening of the 1960s] that I first set eyes on Harold Pinter. We were at a party. It was, I recall, a fondue party. None of the usual rules applied. Knives, forks, spoons: who needed them? Cutlery was dismissed as conventional, and even serviettes had been discarded. Instead, we would — wildly, madly, crazily — dip pieces of bread just any old how into a hot cheesy sauce. Then we would toss them into our mouths as My Old Man’s a Dustman played suggestively in the background. The effect was electrifying.
Pinter and I went outside together. I said nothing. He said nothing. I said nothing back. He added nothing. Nothing would come between us. Pinter was already known for his pauses, but in those extraordinary moments he managed to stretch it from a slight pause to a mild hesitation and then, before we both knew it, to a full-blown silence.
We met many times after that first, fateful meeting . . . Over fondue-based meals, in places as distant as Venice, New York and Hong Kong, we would stare at each other in silence. Before long, our fondues, originally cheese-based, had begun to incorporate chicken, lamb, even beef. There was no turning back.”
From Craig Brown, The Tony Years
