WEEKEND MAGAZINE READING

The Atlantic, April 2007

I never ceased to be amazed at the amount of book review coverage this magazine provides. usually two or three longish reviews that each that run to several pages and then a whole host of briefer reviews of half a column or so.

I was especially taken by one of these briefer reviews which read as follows:

John Betjeman: A Life by A.N.Wilson

and

John Osborne:The Many Lives of the Angry Young Man by John Heilpern

"Two biographies of 20th-century British men of letters bring us England's teddy bear, John Betjeman, and its teddy boy, John Osborne.

Wilson's biography of Betjeman-minor poet, saviour of England's Victorian architecture-became infamous before it reached these shores, because it includes, embarrassingly, a rival biographer's hoax. This hiccup shouldn't eclipse the fact that the book is that rare thing: a first rate biography of a second-rate figure.

Osborne, for his part, was always tormented and tormenting, the scourge of the Establishment and also of those around him. The angry young man never stopped looking back in anger-he titled his last book, after all, with his catchphrase, Damn You, England - and Heilpern, in this comprehensive biography, tells us where all that rage came from. He also puts under a very necessary microscope Osborne's two wonderfully compelling but not always reliable memoirs."

Love it !

A great thing about The Atlantic is that you can browse at back issues, including this one because the May issue is aavailable in the US, from 1995 to the present. Go to their website and have a look.

The Spectator 31 March 2007

Nine pages given over to book reviews and then a further 13 pages to other arts - exhibitions, theatre, cinema, opera, music, radio and television among them.

A provocative piece from The Spectator's Notes column by Charles Moore caught my eye:

'When Lord Turnbull said last week that Gordon Brown was like Stalin, the lack of outrage was interesting. If he had said that Mr.Brown was like Hitler, many would have accused him of grotesque exaggeration and bad taste. This did not happen, partly, perhaps, because people really do think that Mr.Brown is like Stalin, but also because, subliminally, people do not think of Stalin as nearly as bad as Hitler. Yet he was. The two are morally indistinguishable, though their characters were not the same.

Stalin was probably personally the crueller of the two, but Hitler, being more fanatical, was probably even more destructive.Both loved death and absolute power and mass suffering.

It is one of the great and subtle successes of the Left that they have managed to prevent Stalin from completely contaminating their cause, when really the red flag should inspire as much fear and disgust as the swastika."

HARPER'S April 2007

The publishers describe their magazine as an American journal of literature, politics, culture & the arts which has been published since 1850.

It is all of these things although one has to say the interior design is rather boring and certainly old-fashioned.

The first thing I turn to whenever I buy a copy is Harper's Index a page of fascinating US trivia:

Number of bathrooms in John Edward's new North Carolina home: 11

Number of vehicles in the motorcade that transports President Bush to his regular bike ride in Maryland: 14

Amount by which the salary of Judge Judy exceeds the salaries of all nine Supreme Court judges combined: US $26million