w hat does Cherie Blair like to read? Clues are to
be found in the enormous photograph accompanying a recent interview, taken, apparently, in her study at Number 11. Behind her on the bookshelves several titles are discernible. Her reference section gives a fillip to Bill Gates: she has a hardback copy of Microsoft's not universally praised Encana Dictionary. She has the Oxford Dictionaries of Quotations and of Modern Quotations. There's a book on the Australian High Court, and several exotic picture books: Gardens of Colombia, Bermuda Forts, The Art of India and West Cumbrian Views. There are at least three books on Islam: Islam, The Cultural Atlas of Islam and The Art of the Islamic Tile. The cookery section consists of Antonio Carlucci° Goes Wild. In fiction, she has hardbacks of Anne Tyler, Henning Mankell, and the ponderous thriller The Emperor of Ocean Park. The latter may be significant: it was the first novel of a Yale law professor who secured a $4.2 million book deal. Two other titles, perhaps more personal ... Liverpool: The First IOW Years and Millionaires.
Woe betide that public figure who finds himself on the wrong side of the Anthony Powell Society. The chief way of achieving this seems to be to differ with the members of the society in their admiration of their idol. The latest edition of the Powell Society's Newsletter includes a doggerel poem execrating Professor John Carey as 'the don who "reviews" /with a cat in his lap while he's nude'. It accuses Professor Carey of being a 'hack' with a 'myope's strabismic view' and thinking it 'parochially droll! to score cheap points off Powell', before hoping the aforementioned cat bites his private parts.
Sir Max Hastings fares worse. In a review of Michael Barber's biography of Powell, Sir Max described Powell as 'priggish, pretentious and pompous', and said he thought him in the 'second rank' as a writer. His unexceptionable view that Powell is little read among the under-forties didn't endear, either. He has been given their annual Widmerpool Award — for 'petty abuse of power', on the assumption that he was settling a score for some slight in Powell's journals. A bit under a third of the lead essay in the Newsletter is dedicated to Max-bashing, for good measure. Is it sticking my neck on the line to suggest these chaps would benefit from getting out more? I've just lit on The Best Days of Your Life: Teachers and Pupils in Literature and Letters edited by Raymond Chapman, a very beguiling anthology of bite-sized bits of fiction and memoir, helpfully indexed by author. Those preferring to browse thematically can enjoy such section headings as 'Little Victims', 'Little Savages' and — ah, how it takes me back to my own schooldays — 'Rigid, Coarse and Despotic'. Here's Trollope reminiscing: 'I feel convinced in my mind that I have been flogged oftener than any human being alive. It was just possible to obtain five scourgings in one day at Winchester, and I have often boasted that I obtained them all. Looking back over half a century I am not quite sure whether the boast is true; but if I did not, nobody ever did.'
urances Osborne's new book, Lilla's Feast: 1' A True Story of Love, War and a Passion for Food, comes garlanded with advance praise from Amanda Foreman and Santa Montefiore, literary outriders of the Notting Hill Tories. Mrs Osborne is married to George Osborne, the Conservative member for Tatton. The publication of her book gives us an excuse to return to a subject that becomes ever more pressing as her husband nears high office. Is he a George, or is he a Gideon? Once every couple of years, disloyal schoolfriends tip some diary or other off that he was born Gideon but, in his teens, started to insist on being known as George. (George tends to issue denials with veins standing out on his forehead and chips of enamel flying from his molars.) 'He can't stand being called Gideon,' says one friend, who encourages me to do so. I think it makes him the ideal man to rebrand the Conservative party.
Zrinbia, the glossily produced literary magazine, is one year old this month, an achievement by any standards in a publishing
environment unrelentingly hostile to little magazines. But at what cost? To succeed, Zembla has had to sell itself more as a fashion item than something anyone would want to read, with space for serious writing taking a back seat to celebrity endorsement and design gimmickry. The release announcing the anniversary issue, for example, is headed by the following quote: `Zembla is the best magazine in the world for the written word. It is for originals, for people who think.' That's from Manolo Blahnik. He makes shoes.
rrle arrival of a revised volume of the 1 Oxford Dictionary of Quotations brings sadness for my oenophile colleague Simon Hoggart. He uses his Guardian column to advertise his disappointment at not being included. 'Other people think I'm worth including,' he says, remarking that two of his witticisms appear in 'quite a few compilations'. He regards his own best ever joke as: 'Seeing John Major govern the country is like watching Edward Scissorhands try to make balloon animals.' Readers wishing to protest at his exclusion may petition the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, cio The Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford 0X2 6DP. Let's make him the Donald Sinden of the bon mot.
A' practically every reviewer of How to Be Idle seems to have idly pointed out, its author Tom Hodgkinson can't be that lazy if he has bothered to produce a book on the subject. To publicise the launch of the book, Penguin dispatched a group of its loyal employees, paradoxically, to hold a placardwaving protest against work on Waterloo Bridge. The performance poet John Cooper Clarke joined the mob, enjoining the world to resign and spend more time with its family. Not hours later, the Work and Pensions Secretary, whatever his name was, did just that.
nother one for the gazetteer. The week long 2.004 Poetry International starts on the 23rd of next month, at London's South Bank Centre. Star turns over the week include Les Murray. Margaret Atwood, Wendy Cope, Simon Armitage and Charles Simic. The festival opens with a celebration of Anna Akhmatova, includes a Neruda evening, and closes with Don Paterson's T. S. Eliot lecture and a reading to celebrate Faber's 75th birthday. It should be great, in other words. Details are at www. rfh.org.uk/poetryinternational, or you can call the box office on 08701 900 222.
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