Who is popular today?

The author and critic on ‘total bore’ Saul Bellow, how Nietzsche changed his mind, and laughing and crying over Jean Rhys
The book I am currently readingI’m in the rereading phase of my life. Just finished Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus for the third time. Quite something, to be freshly overwhelmed by the greatness of a book you’ve read twice before: every page, every paragraph, every sentence.
The book that changed my lifeA play in the form of a book in the form of a record, to be precise: Shakespeare’s Richard III. We were doing it for O-level. A woman my mum worked with at my old junior school liked Shakespeare and had an LP of an edited version of the play with one of those Hammer horror actors, Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee (I forget which), as Richard. She lent it to me and that, combined with the lessons by a wonderful teacher at grammar school, led to my becoming swallowed up in the currents and eddies of language. I still know huge chunks of the play off by heart. The nice thing about this story is that my mum and her friend weren’t teachers at the school; they both worked in the canteen as dinner ladies. It reminds me of that Play for Today from about the same time, Shakespeare or Bust. Continue reading...