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.

Harvey Jason the extremely nice proprietor of Mystery Pier Books kindly gave me this. What a nice fellow he is. Here we get a little glimpse into the ambivalent life of the John Cheever, which one perceives from his books. For instance his bi-sexuality. Incidentally this is the 100th anniversary of his birth, and I noticed my other fav Michael Chabon was helping celebrate it in New York. As my old friend Barry Cryer said “sometimes life is very well written.” I was also happy to pick up a first edition of Graham Greene’s Heart of the Matter (1948) from Harvey. Rather battered and old but then so am I and the book is still younger than me! This Mystery Pier Books is behind Book Soup on Sunset and well worth a visit… www.mysterypierbooks.com

The Biography of a Comedy Legend A fine biography of a lovely man. I knew him well Horatio. He was on my first honeymoon, in the South of France, during the first week of Python filming in July 1969. Lyn and I would spent Christmas as houseguests with him and Lauretta at his lovely Victorian home in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. He enjoyed his rise to fame, and sudden English popularity, but when the American TV series came along (Marty Feldman’s Comedy Machine) all we potential writers fled from it, except Gilliam who was accustomed to Yanks after all. None of us wanted to turn up at Elstree and write in a factory five days a week, that’s just not the British way. The book is good, with the occasional inevitable inaccuracies: for example I did not accompany Marty’s body home to Hollywood in December as it plainly states, for the simple fact I had left the movie long before he died, actually in October, and I was in Australia by that time. (1982.) Bill Oddie is quoted rather unpleasantly. I don’t remember him being much of a Marty friend, but he speculates about people’s deaths that he knows nothing about. Tim Brooke-Taylor, of course, was very close to him, and is typically generous. Several commentators reveal anger and envy about America and personally I have always used his life as an example of what to avoid in Hollywood: mainly the film business…but then my reasons for coming here were to raise a child, and I told my wife to shoot me if ever I became involved in Hollywood. She kindly consented to do that. The child was a big hit. I will never forget Marty coming home to England to film Yellowbeard, in early September 1982. He came into our house in Carlton Hill and Tania and I were shocked to see how thin and ill he looked. He said he was happy to be back in the UK making something silly with old friends again. He was delightful as ever during the filming in Rye, though chain smoking. I didn’t see that much of him in Mexico, as I was only there for three weeks and had a contract they had to shoot all my scenes, so I could leave quickly, so I left before Peter Cook fell off the waggon and Marty fell off the planet, but there were rumours of cocaine abuse, and clearly the heart attack was massive, though probably survivable in LA. I was always told the story of the ambulance being stuck in Mexico City traffic, which is amongst the worst in the world, so that makes some sense. He was a brilliant writer, a great script editor, an hilarious actor, an extraordinarily loving friend, the finest companion and the most brilliant company. I think he enjoyed his fame and success. But fate and fame conspired as they do for us all. It made me sad to read but happy to remember him.

Almost impossible to believe this name isn’t made up. Anyway the book is composed of quick bites.. or schnacks. Any book that relies on tons of illustrations and different coloured text is clearly not taking itself entirely seriously. It’s a Sun newspaper approach to great authors. Amusing enough, with a strong preference for the scurrilous and naughty. Which would almost describe my friend Jim, who gave it to me as a birthday present.

I came late to this book and admire some of his later work more. This I found a teeny touch tedious, though I love his description of types of people, such as Mavens and Connectors, which are very true and very well observed, I think for the first time. He has such an eye for humanity, and he makes stories out of the most unlikely sources. A fine writer and human being.

Actor poet, ranter. I grow to like the poems more and more, thanks to Julian Sands fine renditions of them publicly, and his memories of working with the fearsome beast of the pause. A fine, sensitive man, and a grand playwright with a great sense of menace. He reminds me of John Donne. Why? I think the mute presence of Death, the ruffian on the staircase, as I think Joe Orton describes it.

A finely written book about fire watching, and the new thinking about fire prevention in America’s wildernesses. Perhaps a little long but intriguing and in praise of solitude.

I picked this up in Washington at Earthling along with another nice Cheever first edition. I must say I can’t imagine how I haven’t poured into Nabokov before. I just adore him. There is something magical in his writing, something poetical, he seems to be able to make you imagine the scene, living, breathing, and in full colour with sound.  It’s quite extraordinary, but then what the brain does with this odd jumbling of letters is very strange and wonderful. Our literacy marks us from the animals. Our brains are extraordinary. And then there are Republicans…. Sorry. I guess they read too. I’m in a waspish mood. The anticipation of travel fills me with delight. Sad to leave the dogs, but the open high road beckons, hey ho…. Get on with it. Nabokov is very funny, his irony always sharp. Pnin is a figure of fun for others but he never loses his dignity. It is of course a mild self portrait of a parody Nabokov, from the physical description of the aging Professor to his job teaching Russian literature to people who are uninterested. The reason Pnin is disqualified from teaching in the French Department is that unfortunately he speaks French and, worse, he can read it. He gently mocks American academia, and, equally well, Russian mispronunciation of English and the manners of the Russian émigrés who have fled to America. A seriously fine novel.

…Which is a problem. This first edition 1948, picked up at Mystery Pier Bookshop, simply cannot follow Lolita. The whole thing reeks of the insensical smell of Catholicism, which is fine if that particular superstition is your bag, but for the more enlightened of us what must we do? Hamlet was a Catholic, in fact so were most of the Kings in his plays, but Shakespeare doesn’t go rubbing our nose in it. OK he was living under a Protestant monarch, but you get my drift. Cheever was a Catholic and he screws almost everything but does he… (ok enough of this, if the Pope wants to get dressed up in The Wicked Witch slippers from the Wizard of Oz and exit an aeroplane dressed as a bride that’s up to her, him, sorry. I mean bad enough having to start your life in the Nazi youth. No wonder Catholicism appeals to him…NOW LOOK stop this anti-Catholic rant, this is supposed to be a book thing. Just remember you are an equal opportunity mocker of superstition. Time and place. Graham Greene. Rapidly sliding off my must-read list. Almost impossible to get Alec Guinness out of your mind too. I’ll give it another bash but I found it a little dull…. Picked it up again, still found it a little dull with even more Catholicism so I dumped it. Sorry. One Act of Contrition, One Hail Mary and a blowjob.

1955. First American Edition, with a facsimile dust jacket. Depressed by seeing a screening of the awful 1962 Kubrick film, which was as bad as I remembered, and which I had to leave early because Peter Sellers was turning it into an audition piece for Dr. Strangelove, I decided to clear my brain by re-reading the brilliance of Nabokov’s prose poem to post paedophilia. (The love object is not pre-pubescent.) And what a brilliant novel it is. By adding two years to the age of the nymphet to make it “acceptable” for Americans and by attempting to turn it into a “comedy” they screwed the essential point, that it is a tragedy; that Humbert Humbert is as unable to avoid his fate as any Frankenstein monster. He is a monster, that is the point, but by recognising his own hopeless lust, and by defining for us its psychological roots in a pre-teenage love affair, the protagonist is able to reveal his weird condition, its very real effects on the hunter and his prey, and their weird collaborative dance. It is a confession, written by the monster who accepts his guilt, as much as he can no longer control it. This to the moment when she seduces him and he discovers she is not quite the innocent he believed. Thereafter the whole central journey of the book, where he entraps the poor girl, enslaves her to his will, and robs her of her childhood, the possibility of friends and any semblance of normality, let alone parental affection, is a long pathetic attempt to defend his crimes. He is a butterfly collector, killing what he adores. It is a murderer’s view of his victim. All justification. Even corrupting Lolita further by rewarding her financially for his gratification, he still robs her of her earned rewards. At no point in his sexual delirium do we learn anything at all about her sexual feelings or responses. It is entirely through his own lust laden eyes. This is not an enchanting story. He even considers fathering a child, and even a grandchild, on her for his further delectation. This is Peter Pan with a vengeance. This is the diary of a madman, and Nabokov makes that quite clear. Of the film, one might say the whole misguided thing was saved only by a fine performance from Shelley Winters as the poor victim/wife/mother Charlotte, or one might observe that Kubrick similarly screws up Arthur Schnitzler’s fine 1926 novella Traumnovelle about anti-Semitism in Austria, by setting his movie adaptation Eyes Wide Closed in a non-existent world of upstate New York, and making it both pointless and unbelievable. The trouble with reading a great book, in this case Lolita, is that reading anything after it puts tremendous pressure on that author. And so to….

I finished the Robert Hughes tome on Rome, which is really a history of Rome through the history of art. Since I know very little of either (after the Romans) it is a jolly good thing, and highly entertaining. It’s a paean to the soul of Rome, which Hughes, the polymath, now believes after centuries has finally deserted it. He argues that the brutality of Mussolini has been inherited by the totally superficial world of his natural successor Berlusconi. It is also an occasional memoir of an art lover who first visited Rome in 1960 and bemoans the changes that have occurred.

Covers Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorki, Tolstoy and Turgenev.

Covers Mansfield Park, Bleak House, Madame Bovary, Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hide, Swann’s Way, The Metamorphosis and Ulysses.

I am fulfilling the ambition of a lifetime by finally reading this book in French. It’s a very good way to appreciate the language of a novel. And Flaubert is a total master of language. Reading is all about the voice of the author. The story teller, the narrator. Dickens without the voice of Dickens is just a story. Same with Jane Austen. I want to read great sentences. It is as satisfactory as music. I am quite impressed with my comprehension of Flaubert’s19th century French, which is extremely fine, and far better than my fluent Franglais. What I do is read a bit of the translation first in English, and then plough into the French, on the I-Pad, so you can flick between the two. It’s a very good way to do it, and as I speak the French out loud people assume I am insane, which is fine by me. It really improves my French comprehension and my French pronunciation and since I am headed for a spell in France this is a very good thing. (pacé Sellers and Yeatman.) Incidentally those who seek to read properly should be acquainted with two brilliant books by Nabokov: indispensable guides to the art of reading. And writing. Try reading one of the novels he discusses and then reading him. He illuminates what you have just enjoyed, adding to your pleasure and making you want to read the book again. Re-reading is one of the great joys of great books. Nabokov says you should read a novel once through, just to understand what is going on, and then several times, as you would scan a painting, and the hidden meanings and echoes and shades then reveal themselves to your mind.

The extremely fine Dave Eggers sends me his latest novel. It is absolutely brilliant. It is so seemingly simple – an ageing failing consultant is sent to Saudi Arabia to negotiate a contract for a US high tech company, only to find in King Abdullah Economic City a baking hot empty space in an empty lot. During the endless frustrations of waiting to meet the King or at least his emissary, he remembers his failed business life, contemplates the state of society (qv), discovers a hidden world of booze and pills amongst the ex-pat community, undertakes surgery and falls for his doctor, and attempts to write to a letter to his daughter justifying her mother, his divorced wife, whom he hates. It is Kafka, Lost in Translation, Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman and, well, Dave Eggers. His writing is so clear, and effortless and his story telling so artful that we feel as much at a loss as Alan in this strange world. Yusef an amusing driver, who is fearful of assassination from a rich man who thinks he is having an affair with his wife, is also highly entertaining and gives him a fine Sancho Panza foil. This is how he sums up the effect of a long neglected bill from Banana Republic and its effect on his credit rating: “The age of machines holding dominion over man had come. This was the downfall of a nation and the triumph of systems designed to thwart all human contact, human reason, personal discretion and decision making.” Wise and witty and funny and intensely readable. Order it now.

Picked up a nice first edition paperback of these short stories. Which sped me happily to Mexico.

Sure to remain an all-time favourite of mine. He is fully into his stride, and what makes him a great writer is the underlying humour which is never very far away. Somewhat like Evelyn Waugh in this respect. His comedy is naturalist and real and human, not farce; again like the mature Waugh.

I was so looking forward to reading this book. I have been on such a Cheever jag that I suppose I could only be disappointed. It was his first full length novel, after having been a brilliant short story writer and it took him a long time, and indeed he won awards but for me it is too tricksy. I believe he had to write this to get where he was going, but there are whole chapters in diary note form, and, well I put it down twice and still picked it up before finally passing on it. But compare it to the superb Bullet Park and you see where he is going and what this one is lacking.

My Pursuit of Women. Memoirs of a horny chap. I’m not a huge Ellroy fan. I don’t think he writes quite well enough. These are early sexual memoirs, and if you like that sort of thing then you’ll like this. He seems an agreeable chap, and of course a literary star, but not, for me, a literary lion.

I really enjoyed Hollywood Moon recently but this one reads like a sequel, many of the same characters, which is fine and the story line is ok, but it needs a rewrite and probably the market demands didn’t give him time. He is a very good story teller but not a great writer.