It's a shame about the silly name, but with writing by the likes of William Boyd, Nicholas Hytner, Ralph Fiennes, Sam Leith and Francis Stonor Saunders, this is a real gem
In search of excellence … Craig Raine, editor of Areté. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe
A confession: I have never read an issue of Areté, the literary magazine edited by Craig Raine. I have a problem: its name. From the ancient Greek for virtue, or excellence. I mean, why not put more people off and use the Greek letters? So when its editor pressed this selection from its contents over the last, or first, 13 years of its existence on me in the course of a rather one‑sided correspondence, I felt rather burdened; and not least because the book is printed on some kind of paper that would appear to be as dense as sheet steel.
However, after a while I found that Mr Raine was pushing at an open door. Once I had done my exercises and was strong enough to pick the book up, I found wonders. Areté's editorial brief is simple: they publish anything they like. Raine being pretty well-connected as these things go, this means he can draw on a large pool of talent; having experienced his powers of persuasion at first hand, I now begin to see how he could have got Ian McEwan to contribute a chapter of Solar for nothing – which, Raine says in his introduction, is like being given £5,000. Contributors, both known and unknown, are not paid, but you can't really call this exploitation.
There are close to 50 pieces in here, and they range all over the shop. They are also all very good. I can imagine that after 39 issues (this being, in effect, issue 40) there may well be enough material to make a decent selection, and even at 500 pages this does not feel stretched. Everything in here works. It's as simple as that. (James Fenton's dig at Jeremy Prynne is perhaps not as funny as he thinks: "Jeremy Prynne / Jeremy Prynne / Isn't your oeuvre rather thynne?", but then it's all part of the anti-Cambridge thing going on – the magazine is Oxford-based, but don't let that put you off.) Subjects include, in no particular order: Matthew Norman on what it's like to be stabbed; Sam Leith on living alone in New York, trying to get interviews out of relatives of those who died on 9/11; William Boyd on how to make a film; Nicholas Hytner on directing Alan Bennett; Ralph Fiennes on acting Shakespeare; Frances Stonor Saunders on the scandal of the Swiss Verdingkinder, or "earning children", (orphans tendered out to families for sale and slavery, a medieval practice that didn't end until the early 1950s); and other pieces that invite the reader to contemplate modes of existence beyond the comforts of the sedentary, literary life: training at Sandhurst, or being in Afghanistan, or aboard the USS Roosevelt.
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There are close to 50 pieces in here, and they range all over the shop. They are also all very good. I can imagine that after 39 issues (this being, in effect, issue 40) there may well be enough material to make a decent selection, and even at 500 pages this does not feel stretched. Everything in here works. It's as simple as that. (James Fenton's dig at Jeremy Prynne is perhaps not as funny as he thinks: "Jeremy Prynne / Jeremy Prynne / Isn't your oeuvre rather thynne?", but then it's all part of the anti-Cambridge thing going on – the magazine is Oxford-based, but don't let that put you off.) Subjects include, in no particular order: Matthew Norman on what it's like to be stabbed; Sam Leith on living alone in New York, trying to get interviews out of relatives of those who died on 9/11; William Boyd on how to make a film; Nicholas Hytner on directing Alan Bennett; Ralph Fiennes on acting Shakespeare; Frances Stonor Saunders on the scandal of the Swiss Verdingkinder, or "earning children", (orphans tendered out to families for sale and slavery, a medieval practice that didn't end until the early 1950s); and other pieces that invite the reader to contemplate modes of existence beyond the comforts of the sedentary, literary life: training at Sandhurst, or being in Afghanistan, or aboard the USS Roosevelt.
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