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What I read

Finished This House of Grief, which is not the sort of thing I normally read much of (grim true crime in Australia) - and I started it and it languished for a bit and then I was reading it on the train and it became compelling, and I had to finish it before going on to anything else.

Sally Smith, A Case of Life and Limb (The Trials of Gabriel Ward Book 2) (2025), which was absolutely lovely, just so good.

Then got back to Selina Hastings on Sybille Bedford, which was a competent enough biography -

- except, I then read Norma Clarke, Brothers of the Quill: Oliver Goldsmith in Grub Street (2016) and she just does so much with context and making a literary living and Irish identity in the English literary world and issues of status and class and so on. And okay, part of that is because there's actually not a lot of reliable material on Goldsmith, so it makes sense to look at him in this wider view - and as part of the bro culture of the time (I admit this was rather less appealing than her earlier studies of women of the same era).

- so I looked back and thought there were quite a lot of questions around Sybille and what it meant to her to have all those affairs with women and yet be a bit iffy about claiming Lesbian identity - not to mention the economics of her situation - and class and nationality and so forth. But I guess that wasn't the book she was writing.

Then read Anthony Powell, The Valley of Bones (1964), which is sort of the male equivalent of those women's novels of the early stage of WW2 when it's all waiting round and preparation rather than anything actually happening.

On the go

Picking things up and putting them down, trying to decide what to read next.

Up next

Vide supra.

Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

I don't know if anyone else has clocked this, which sounds like another of those vexatious cases brought by Christian homophobes, about the rainbow pedestrian - or as I was wont to call them in my youth, 'zebra' - crossings. The logic is, shall we say, convoluted.

Camden resident Blessing Olubanjo has told the local authority to get rid of the three blue, pink and white-painted pedestrian crossings... or else she would begin judicial review proceedings. She complained that the markings, installed in 2021 during Transgender Awareness Week, infringed her rights as a Christian and constituted “unlawful political messaging”. In a letter to the Town Hall, she said: “As a Christian and a taxpayer, I should not be made to feel excluded or marginalised by political symbols in public spaces.” Ms Olubanjo has been supported by Christian Legal Society, which has cited a section in the Local Government Act 1986 prohibiting councils from publishing material that appears to promote a political party or controversial viewpoint, and the crossings were a form of ‘publication’.

But where is this that she is protesting?

Why, in the very heart of Bloomsbury, and not just Any Old Bit of Bloomsbury ('living in squares, loving in triangles') but Marchmont Street.

Where we may find the iconic Gay's the Word bookshop as featured in the movie Pride (inaccurately described there as being in Soho) and a blue plaque for Kenneth Williams, and close by one for Boulton and Park.

Anyway Camden Council '“entirely rejects” her argument, and [said] that the borough has “no place for hate”' and the views of local people taken by The Local Democracy Reporting Service were very much on the side of leaving the crossings be.