Authors know everything
After a week in which the Royal Mail lost its monopoly on delivering parcels for the Post Office (after 360 years you'd have thought they'd got the hang of it)...
“Mail your packages early so the post office can lose them in time for Christmas.”
King of the American talk show (and author of thousands of jokes), Johnny Carson
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The Race to the Future by Kassia St Clair John Murray £20
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For those exasperated by the creep of 20mph speed limits, it could be worse: there could be no road at all. This was the comic reality faced by the competitors in one of the greatest of all motorised contests, the 1907 Peking-Paris race, rendered here in magnificent detail. The five competitors – one a three-wheeler with horsepower less than a Vespa – had to cope with a course that included the Gobi desert, the “great Siberian tract” (“nothing but a deep rut”) and the Nankou mountain pass, said to be “made up of steps, each as high as two ordinary steps and around three metres deep.” Such conditions were hardly, as the author understates, “an ideal surface on which to drive.” The tip to help drivers from one side of the Gobi to the other was to follow the telegraph poles – and the bones of dead animals. For an adrenaline cocktail of adventure and all the other things that had to catch up – fuel, roads, tyres etc. you have reached your destination. And to make that 20mph speed limit feel more palatable, the first stage unfolded at exceptional velocity: slower than walking pace.
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The Strong Words Hot List Recent memoirs from those who also entertain in song |
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5 From Mohair Suits to Kinky Boots by Geoff Deane. Muswell Press, £16.99
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Deane, the focus of attention of early eighties wedge-cut chart opportunists and corporate entertainers Modern Romance, runs through a career in musical graft as a conveyor belt of unapologetic bantering anecdote, including neighbours with rude names, a trumpet player regurgitates mid-parp, and the shame of hearing one’s love letters read out in a pub.
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4 George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle by Philip Norman Simon & Schuster, £25
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It’s never easy standing in one shadow, but standing in two, and shadows as long as Lennon and McCartney’s… perhaps it was no wonder George could be a little tetchy at times (“F*** off, I’m meditating.”) He got a measure of revenge for years of being sidelined with a solo album that outsold either of L or M's solo debuts, but for most people, the fact that he was even in the Beatles is more than enough.
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3 Karma by Boy George Blink Publishing, £22
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Now onto his third autobiography, “in” are astrology, the Three Principles of Buddhism and emphasising how he’s not a hateful person (although is clearly a hair-trigger de-friender). The big event since Book 2 is his spell in jail for “falsely imprisoning” another man. For all his babble though, he is still undeniably famous, and whatever your strength of feeling about the moon being in Gemini, this is what star quality looks like.
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2 Lou Reed, the King of New York by Will Hermes Viking, £25
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Rock’s Mr Difficult returns to the bookshelf as access to a giant new archive of Reediana becomes available. Ever intriguing as part of the nocturnal, New York flipside of the counter-culture, and with songs that have entered the wedding/advertising/name-that-tune-in-one category sitting atop a deep repertoire of unsettling material, his relentless unfriendliness continues to appeal.
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1 My Name is Barbra by Barbra Streisand Century, £35
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After being pestered for her entire career to write a memoir (including by Jackie Kennedy during her time in the book trade), the ultra-diva has finally got round to producing a 992-page murder weapon. And it has everything – having to pull a wedged-in Marlon Brando out of a car because he’d got so fat (apparently during the journey), a wonderful wigmaker who was also ahead of the curve with salad dressings, her mother only sending negative gossip clippings – your PhD in Streisand studies begins here.
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A Strong Words' favourite wins a tiny French prize
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Congratulations to Jean-Baptiste Andrea for this week winning the top French literary "prix", the Goncourt. The Goncourt famously pays its winners just ten euros, having neglected to enhance its bounty since 1903, the year when it was first bestowed. While you're waiting for the translators to apply their dictionaries to Veiller sur Elle (Watch Over Her), about a poor Italian sculptor's love for an aristocrat during the Mussolini years, please read Jean-Baptiste's A Hundred Million Years and a Day (Gallic, £10.99). It was number 11 in SW's best books of 2020, and is about an obsessed professor's Alpine quest to find a cave rumoured to contain a giant dinosaur fossil that will make his career. You won't regret it!
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(More on the thread that began with Teju Cole's character in Tremor saying that all hikers have deviant "interests", leading to an unsubstantiated accusation (by me) that cyclists, and perhaps divers, should also be added to the dataset...)
Dear Ed, re: your mention of divers as a group of people with an exceptionally strong attraction to their outfit, I recall you mentioning in a Strong Words years ago a diver during the war who once wore his frogman's costume on a date. Do you remember who this was? Jerry B, (subscriber)
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I can't remember the source of that intel, but the diver was Lionel "Buster" Crabb, a British wartime underwater bomb disposal legend who was short-sighted, had little interest in safety measures or knowing how his equipment worked, and when out of the water, chain-smoked, drank non-stop and carried a silver sword stick. One rumour had it that he turned up on a first date in a restaurant in full frogman rig, mask and all. His ex-wife is reported to have said he enjoyed wearing a pink rubber mackintosh under his naval uniform that made him "rustle like a Christmas tree". He disappeared on a clandestine dive on the Russian ship carrying Kruschev on a visit to Portsmouth harbour in 1956. If anyone can recommend a good Crabb book, please do. (Ed)
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(On the mention in Roger Lewis' Burton/Taylor book Erotic Vagrancy, that Burton's father recommended "a spoonful of Vaseline before bed" as a hangover cure...)
On the subject of eating Vaseline… my Grandad’s home remedy for sore throats was a spoonful of Vaseline. Like Richard Burton’s dad he didn’t leave details of how large a spoonful. He kept doing it, so I guess he thought it worked, but I’ve never been tempted to try it! Naomi S, (subscriber)
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The window for sharing information about optimistic remedies for all ailments – in books or life – is now open. (Ed)
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How to make a breakfast fit for a king...
According to What's Cooking in the Kremlin?, by Witold Szabłowski (Icon Books, £20), a magnificent new history of modern Russia as seen through the Kremlin kitchens and others who spoke menu options to power...
“The Tsar would come down to breakfast at about 1pm. Of the 150 or so employees of the imperial kitchen, ten cooked exclusively for the royal family and their guests.”
“Let’s take a look at a standard breakfast menu. On October 10, 1906, the imperial family was served cream of asparagus soup, lobster, leg of wild goat, celery salad, peaches, and coffee. On September 10, 1907, they were served pearl barley soup (with pickled gherkins, carrots, and peas), potato pancakes, salmon pâté, roast beef, chicken breast, pears in sherry, and a cranberry tart with sugar... But despite this richly laden table, sometimes the tsar ate nothing but an egg or two, and his wife would eat only some vegetables. Both of them watched their figures, and Nicholas weighed himself several times a day.” “‘They threw away a great deal of food,’ says Mrs. Zalivskaya (great-granddaughter of one of the chefs), spreading her hands. ‘But he was the tsar. He couldn’t just be served two eggs for breakfast. The appropriate ceremony had to be observed.’”
(Imperial baking tip: the baker kept his arms shaved to the elbows.)
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