Authors know everything
After a week in which Donald Trump (again) was ordered to pay author and Elle magazine agony aunt E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million for defaming her while president, by denying he had sexually abused her...
“America has gone from the Obama Years to the Trump Years, like going from The West Wing to a sitcom where the incidental music involves a tuba.”
Frankie Boyle, author of Meantime, a "a picaresque detective story set against the backdrop of post-referendum Scotland."
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Only Say Good Things by Crystal Hefner. Ebury Spotlight £22
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On October 31, 2008, Crystal Harris, 21, entered the fabled Playboy mansion for the first time with a group of other young women hired to provide decorative services for a party of some sort. From San Diego, the daughter of a hard-up single mother, this felt like her big chance at making it – celebrities! The rich and powerful! And the great Oz himself, Hugh Hefner! She made enough of an impression on the old goat that she was invited to join his harem, yet soon realised that what she had assumed to be an epicentre of Hollywood razzle-dazzle was a rather tragic and dilapidated compound. Everything ran according to the geriatric Hefner's rigid routines, where the women around him were expected to feign interest in everything he did and said. In 2010 he announced they were to be married (news to her), and she sat for a Playboy cover to announce the happy development, wearing Hef's signature captain's hat (plus pipe). She ran away, but came back to become the third and last Mrs Hefner at 26. Her husband was 86. He would die five years later but not before instructing her to "only say good things" – about him, to help maintain his"legacy". Find out if she does as ordered. Buy this book
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The Strong Words Hot List 2024 already losing its allure? Have some history... |
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5. The Picnic by Matthew Longo Bodley Head, £22
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When Hungary's reform-minded prime minister Németh held a symbolic three-hour relaxation of border controls with Austria in the summer of 1989, an activist group decided to hold a "picnic". Several hundred East Germans timed their holidays to coincide, and turned up sans tartan rugs and scotch eggs. When the fence was disconnected from its electricity supply, the picnickers poured through, beginning the process that just three months later would also put the Berlin Wall beyond repair. Buy this book
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4. Survivors by Hannah Durkin William Collins, £22
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In July 1860, a ship called the Clotilda docked in Alabama with a human cargo, the last consignment of captive Africans to be sold into the United States' slave economy. Survivors charts the journeys of the 110 involuntary transports, from being abducted in what is now Nigeria, the unimaginable ordeal of the 45-day Middle Passage, and life in the US as the final survivors of the Atlantic slave trade. Buy this book
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3. Judgement at Tokyo by Gary J. Bass Picador, £30
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While the Nazi trials at Nuremberg tend to be held up as a triumph of international legal cooperation in testing circumstances, the Japanese version, held in Tokyo 1946-48, left plenty grumbling. From an embarrassing alcoholic lead American prosecutor, to the atom bomb obliteration of Japanese cities and an Indian judge unsympathetic to Western claims, it was not only the Japanese that came under the microscope of "international law". Buy this book
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2. The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World by Bettany Hughes W&N, £25
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The canonical seven wonders of the world, while not so wonderful for most people's lists to extend much beyond "pyramids", still generate a sense that they ought to be known about. Here comes an entertaining opportunity to fill that gap. The author goes to have a look at what remains of them and divines the purpose behind their original construction, and addresses the mystery of the one wonder – the Hanging Gardens – that may never even have existed. Buy this book
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1. Cold Crematorium by József Debreceni Jonathan Cape, £16.99
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Written by a Hungarian journalist in 1950 but never previously translated into English, this is an outstanding first hand report on a rarely mentioned part of the Nazi murder infrastructure – because so few survived it. After performing slave labour at Auschwitz, the author was sent to a "hospital", essentially a derelict factory where the sick were abandoned, unclothed and rarely fed, in unspeakable squalor. Unlike most, he came out alive. Buy this book
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Pro-book-ban bigot outraged when own books are banned.
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For several years Bill O'Reilly was the top-rated host at Fox Television in the US until derailed by allegations of sexually harassing the staff.
A Fox investigation then discovered even more incidents, and he parted ways with his employer while on a trip to Italy in 2017 – to meet the Pope.
Several cases were settled with large, Prince Andrew-style payments to his accusers.
He has since been filling his time writing a successful strand of books whose titles all begin with the word "Killing", such as Killing Kennedy, Killing England ("The Brutal Struggle for American Independence") and Killing Lincoln.
While still on air, one of the many bigoted positions he would rant to camera about was his support of Florida legislation to impose a ban on books in schools.
Children needed protecting, he insisted, from "far-left progressive people trying to impose an agenda."
The initiative was so lunatic that books banned include Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile, Richard Adams' Tales from Watership Down and five dictionaries.
But also appearing on the latest list of banned books are two, Killing Jesus and Killing Reagan, by one Bill O'Reilly. And he's losing it again.
Suddenly he's no longer adamant about the need for such enthusiastic prohibition, is said to be "furious" his own books are outlawed, and wants the law changed again, for being far too "nebulous" in its wording.
If Florida legislators were so sausage-fingered as to ban dictionaries, I don't fancy their chances debating the finer points of nebulosity of their fancy new law's details.
Take him down!
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More on the dreadful first lines in literature debate...
Hi Ed, this is more of a dreadful last line than rotten opener, but have you ever seen the inscription on Edward "Dark and stormy night" Bulwer-Lytton's tomb in Westminster Abbey's St Edmund's chapel? See if you can stay awake to the end of this: "Laborious and distinguished in all fields of intellectual activity indefatigable and ardent in the cultivation and love of letters his genius as an author was displayed in the most varied forms which have connected indissolubly with every department of the literature of his time the name of Edward Bulwer Lytton."
Jerry M, (whereabouts unknown)
You'd have though they could at least have spared him a couple of commas, what with him being a friend of Dickens and all. So remember, people – it's all well and good coming up with the high minded sentiments, but you've still got to tip the stonemason properly. Ed.
And miraculously, a second email on Edward B-L (clearly an author close to the heart of the Strong Words reader)...
Dear Ed, I don't know when you last read Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii (a big hit in its day), but you can't fail to have noticed this piano going down a flight of stairs that kicks things off: "'Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to-night?' said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and effeminate folds which proved him to be a gentleman and a coxcomb."
Roger W, (subscriber)
More "good" and "bad" writing please, and suggestions how to tell the difference between one and the other, to info@strong-words.co.uk.
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And on the other big developing theme of this newsletter, poetry...
Ed, like you, my father was not an admirer (of poetry). In fact he disliked it so passionately he wouldn't allow it inside the house. It was part of a long list of things he found an "abomination". Also not permitted through the door were white sugar, tartan, tabloid newspapers, red clothing, any vegetables in plastic wrapping, Teacher's or Bell's whisky, disposable plastic razors, anchovies, and probably a number of other items that had at some point caused unforgiveable offence. The only exception were poets I had to read for school, although he would bristle and mutter if he ever caught sight of them. For some reason Gerard Manley Hopkins particularly bothered him. I took my revenge by becoming an English teacher and absolutely ramming poetry down my students' throats.
Siobhan K, (whereabouts unknown)
If you know of anyone who has taken their feelings about the written word to a ludicrous extreme, please share the details at info@strong-words.co.uk.
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How an unconventional career path may not be a bad idea...A happy 75th birthday last Thursday to John Cooper Clarke, living evidence that I may be wrong about poetry, and who wrote in the prologue to his hugely enjoyable 2020 memoir I Wanna Be Yours (Picador, £10.99) that, "All my life, all I ever wanted to be was a professional poet." The reasons? "You get to wear fine clothes and perfume and nobody pulls you up on it. You get out of bed late in the day and nobody calls you a lazy bastard. A state of reverie and the virtue of idleness are paramount. Any poet will tell you this. "The life of a useless flâneur, however, was not encouraged in the 1950s, especially among the blue-collar population of a heavy-industrial metropolis like Manchester." And even though the only things his parents ever told him he couldn't do were "get a bike and make a living as a poet", he went ahead and did both. Proof of the latter is a slim new volume out next month, called What (Picador, £16.99) Specific advice as to how to get on professionally in the field of verse is scarce in either book, other than this in I Wanna Be Yours: "although I like to think I've led a charmed life, I never took the safe route. I always thought, it might not be good right now, but its going to pay off later. And every time, I've been proven right." He also got himself a bike as a youth, even going so far as creating a "snack of my own design – a pork pie doorstep" to fuel his outings. "Here's the recipe: take one white loaf (unsliced), hollow it out, place three pork pies and eight pickled onions into the vacant space, then flatten the whole thing out." That'll keep you going. Buy these books
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