Search Results

“... Ionce​ asked a high-up man in British Rail if he could name the most frightening train journey in the UK. He didn’t hesitate. ‘The last train from Aberdeen to Glasgow on a Friday night,’ he said, before adding, with some emphasis, ‘via Dundee.’ In the heyday of the oil boom, many oil-rig workers, heading home after two weeks ‘on’, would pitch up for the journey about eight pints in, with a ‘carry-out’ – a bag full of drink – to help end the bevvy-hiatus they had suffered while in the middle of the North Sea ...”

“... What is the relationship between fiction and knowledge? How much can Crime and Punishment tell us about the habits of Russian pawnbrokers? Would you know how to build a raft after reading Huckleberry Finn? Could Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho be construed as a guide to sniffing cocaine and murdering your date? There’s no doubt that one learns things by reading novels – and by writing them – but is that something rightly termed knowledge, or are we simply talking about the sparks that jump at you from the centre of an interesting blaze? You might argue that good novels depend on being able to dramatise what people don’t know: the author may know things, and so may the reader, but people not knowing things is always more interesting than what they know ...”

“... On the eve​ of the first lockdown, I made my way to the Hammersmith Apollo to attend a performance by Whitney Houston. It was a chill, ominous night and the people outside the venue were wide-eyed and excited about their forthcoming encounter with the undead. I had come along in the course of my duties as a hopeless necromantic. I don’t think I have ever believed that pop stars and movie stars actually die – death becomes them, and true legends have a tendency to ghost the future – but even so I was nervous that the certifiably snuffed-it Whitney might not be up to snuff ...”

“... There was only one other person in the life of Samuel Johnson who stood a chance of writing a biography as entertaining as Boswell’s. Francis Barber was overqualified by modern standards, and too loyal for the job in any era, but for more than thirty years he was Johnson’s (black) manservant. There in the small hours – peeling oranges, brewing tea, mending stockings, lifting papers – Barber was considered to be all the disciples other than Judas, though one now wonders, naturally, what the servant could have offered the great moralist in the way of a horrific posthumous disservice ...”

“... everything, and everything was glorious. Warhol became a virtual-reality show starring himself: Andrew Warhola playing ‘Andy’ better than Norma Jean Baker ever played ‘Marilyn’. In 1968, while Soviet tanks prepared to roll into the Czechoslovakia of Andy’s origins, Warhol was writhing in agony on the floor of his New York studio, shot by Valerie ...”

“... Even as late as the 1950s, at the height of his fame as a playwright, Arthur Miller would periodically leave his nice house to hang around the dockyards. He had worked for two years in the 1930s at a car parts warehouse, where he first encountered anti-semitism and suspicion. Reading Russian novels on his way into work, he found, when he considered it later, that the workers ‘feared his intelligence, his application, his ambition and his thrift, taking all these as tokens of his Jewish identity ...”

“... My grandmother’s house in Millroad Street existed to remind us that we had probably done something wrong. The Glasgow habit of calling it a house has survived with me, but it was really a tenement flat across the road from the fish shop where my grandmother worked. The flat had a plastic holy water font by the front door and the three rooms smelled of vegetable soup ...”

“... Coming over the Hollywood Hills at this time of year you drive on roads edged with blue flowers. The jacaranda is dropping like crazy and around every bend the McMansions seem to cry out their phoney perfection. You pass a mini-Tuscany and meet a little England on your way to Ventura Freeway, the 101, that leads to a valley of shopping malls and awesome haze ...”

“... Elizabeth Smart was browsing one day between the wars in the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. Young, blonde and original, unclaimed by her Ottawa upbringing or her mother’s social hopes, Smart came to lean against those London bookshelves as if they alone contained all the answers. That day, she drew her finger over a line of volumes, took one down and read the poems where she stood, deciding by the last page that the author was the man she was put on earth to marry ...”

“... of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, there are 700 agents at CAA, but the story told in James Andrew Miller’s riveting book is really about the personalities who invented the game. It is, more particularly, the story of what Michael Ovitz gave to the world and what that world took away from him. It’s Citizen Kane to a disco beat with the moral ...”

“... Until recently, the art of modern biography was too little influenced by the man who invented it, James Boswell, and, even today, many of those who set out to write the lives of authors seem to be led by a suspicion that everything of interest about the subject might already have been said by the subject himself. The literary biographer is haunted by Nabokov’s stylishly defensive comment that the only biography of a writer that matters is the biography of his style ...”

“... Since the beginning of time – or of poetry – people have imagined the Moon is watching them. When I was a child I thought the Moon was a chum. Every boy had a torch and at night I shone mine from the bedroom window, refusing to be upstaged by the big torch in the sky. I remember asking my mother if the Moon could come on holiday with us, and she laughed, exactly the same laugh as my father gave out when I said I wanted to be a film star ...”

“... In​ the 1990s, when literary parties were more fun, or I was more fun, I used occasionally to see Stephen Spender: there he was, the establishment on quivering legs, queer as a chocolate orange but safely married. (When I spoke to him, I discovered he could flirt with his eyes shut.) Frank Kermode, a great friend to this paper but never knowingly unmalicious, remarked that ‘Stephen never knew where he was going but he always knew the quickest way to get there ...”

“... Joanne Catherall and Phil Oakey of the Human League performing in 1982. Iwas​ in Skegness the weekend Britain left the EU. It was raining, and a cold, hard breeze was blowing in from the North Sea. At Butlin’s, in a huge tent filled with burger bars and dayglo cocktails, the Brexiteers were dancing to 1980s pop music and getting excited. A number of drunk men were dressed as St George, wearing England flags and Crusader helmets ...”

“... For scholars​ of heartbreak and trepidation, the Dolly Parton songbook is a core text. No other singer would say ‘please’ when begging Jolene not to take her man. In Country Music, Ken Burns’s recent documentary series, Parton insists a great song is like an heirloom or a keepsake, essentially a piece of storytelling. A well-written song can dramatise a wonderful character or bring back a singular voice, and in these senses, among others, the siren of East Tennessee is better than most poets ...”