This Coming Thursday...

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World Book Week: Thomas' Clapham, Reading of The Liberators

It's WORLD BOOK WEEK. Huzzah! A week to celebrate books can only be a Good Thing (although I don't especially agree with the million book give away - but that's another question.)

A drizzly, dour start to the week, but a splendidly warm welcome from the pupils and staff of Thomas' Clapham. I almost didn't make it on time, as I relied on my GPS phone working - which of course it didn't, in the wilds of Clapham (chiz chiz); luckily I'd absent-mindedly looked at a map at breakfast and was able to use my knowledge of the stars to find the school, which is a large Victorian-gothic, gingerbread coloured mansion.

I chatted to the older years briefly, and read them the first chapter of The Liberators. There were some good questions from the floor ('is Rio Ferdinand your favourite footballer?' [to put this in context, he attended {accidentally} my launch party last year]).

All in all it was a fun beginning to what promises to be an extremely dervishing kind of week. I've got two more school talks, and an event with the fantastic Mr Philip Reeve in Richmond on Thursday. Long live The Liberators!

Eight White Nights by André Aciman: review

....And also I've reviewed André Aciman's new novel, Eight White Nights, for Telegraph Online. I loved his first novel, Call Me By Your Name: this one I'm not so sure about, which is a great shame. Click HERE to read it.

Jubilate by Michael Arditti: review

I've reviewed Michael Arditti's new novel, Jubilate, about a pilgrimage to Lourdes, for the Daily Telegraph. Click HERE to read it.

Duff Cooper Prize: Sarah Bakewell, Winner

The Duff Cooper Prize is always an occasion of great joy, which takes place in the pleasing confines of the French Embassy in Kensington. It's recently been redecorated - now, standing in it, one slightly feels as if one is being beamed up to a flying saucer, as one half of the room is bathed in lilac light, with an extraordinary gold and silver chandelier (apparently hand made in Venice), whilst the other half of the room is as it always was, with hunting tapestries and so on; if you stand underneath the square halogen lighting for too long you will find that your skin will start to resemble Dale Winton's.

Even so, the place was humming - if not pullullating - tonight with the literary great and good. I saw Sebastian Faulks, bearded and laughing, in the far distance; Jacqueline Wilson was nodding and smiling somewhere beyond my left elbow; Edmund de Waal (who is remarkably tall - now there's a Clerihew for you) was looming about the room; and the usual gamut of bookish types, great and small (including me, who comes somewhere above a bacterium and somewhere below a protozoan) were quaffing and chattering. Biographer Jeremy Lewis was genially beaming; as was his biographical colleague Jane Ridley, whose amazing red velvet coat I have mentioned before; Nicky Haslam popped in, well-dressed as ever; explorer John Hemming was there with his family in attendance, including son Henry Hemming (whose new book, Together, is out now). Novelist James Buchan had brought his daughter Lizzie, thereby reducing the average age of the room by about twenty years; I was mistaken for somebody's great great grandson (whose, exactly, I have yet to discover, though Violet Trefusis seemed to be involved).

Great thanks are due to the marvellous Artemis Cooper, Duff Cooper's daughter, who organises the event, and to the wonderful hospitality of the Embassy and the liberal amounts of Pol Roger. There was plenty of tough competition for the prize. Keith Richards was up for it - although, sadly, he couldn't make it. He is, I believe, the only rock star ever to have been nominated for the award. (I think he would have been at home in the lilac light.)

The winner of the prize was Sarah Bakewell for her brilliant book about Montaigne - who as Andrew Marr pointed out, we like to coopt as an English author, despite the fact that he is most definitely French. Bakewell spoke about the last time she won an award - as an eleven year old, for preeminence in first aiding. Fortunately, none of the guests were in need of her services; the evening, aided by cartloads of champagne and some perfectly delicious meringues, continued with no casualties. Even I managed not to break anything; and that is a triumph in itself.

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, dir. Peter Hall: review

Twelfth Night has always been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays (and not least because, at the risk of sounding like Polonius, I once played Malvolio...). It inhabits a territory that points towards the weird, late romances (which I favour over the comedies): a shipwreck, lost children, revelations. It is as full of wonder as any of the romances. It's also supremely well-knit, spare and tight, each word doing the job of three or four, its verbal dexterity and shot-silk quality embodied in the words of Feste.

The staging of Sir Peter Hall's production at the National Theatre was also spare. Viola (played by a charmingly gawky Rebecca Hall) stood at the beginning, bereft of everything she has known, her back towards the man who will help her. Orsino's (Martin Csokas) luxurious court was hinted at by three or four cushions (Orsino himself looked like a cushion, wearing a brilliantly long dressing gown of the type which I wish they still made. Barry Lyndon wears one in the Kubrick film, too.) The bare stage focused attention on the actors.

On the aristocratic side, Orsino was debauched, world-weary, commanding his group of courtiers with a languid finger. By contrast, Olivia (Amanda Drew), mourning her brother, was controlled and clearly able to run her household. It struck me that perhaps Olivia senses something missing in Viola - another lost brother - which might aid her infatuation. Drew was almost matronly, which belied her passion; my only difficulty was that one of her best lines ('lips - indifferent red') was swallowed. Sebastian (Ben Mansfield) was a fine, swashbuckling type, although with a slight femininity which maybe draws the captain to him, and helps us to understand the confusion between brother and sister.

Downstairs, Sir Toby Belch was played with malevolent sottishness by Simon Callow. This production really highlighted the cruelty of the trick they play on Malvolio (Simon Paisley Day) - played as a smooth-talking, smooth-dressing major-domo. The imprisonment scene had Malvolio in a tiny cage, blindfolded; with Feste (David Ryall) prancing around him and some sinister violin shrieking, the effect was positively hellish. Sir Andrew Aguecheek was absolutely marvellous, I thought. His foppishness and vanity were given an amiable touch, and Charles Edwards' face provoked many of the biggest laughs. When Malvolio stormed in and shouted 'do you make an alehouse of my lady's?' he nodded fervently as if he were a schoolboy who'd been caught by the headmaster.

Twelfth Night is a play with no pat ending. Malvolio's last line, 'I'll be revenged - on the whole pack of you!' resonated loudly, and pointed towards the ambiguity of the solution to everyone's problems. Only Viola gets her true love; Olivia makes do with a copy, whilst Orsino's decision is based on practicality.

And Feste - when I first saw him I thought they'd made a terrible mistake. He was old, shrivelled. But then as the play went on I realised what a masterstroke it was. To have him singing 'youth's a stuff will not endure' gains extra poignancy. Feste's wildly wisecracking wit turns everything on its head: the fool is no fool, and Ryall's wizened old man showed in bold colours quite how full of wisdom he is. He sang in a slightly-out of tune warble (though trying to get the audience to join in at the end was not a good idea, I thought.)

It was a stately production, perhaps a little lacking in energy, but that added to its sense of elegy. 'Come Away Death', let's not forget, is one of the songs in it; and the Fool's song is repeated in King Lear.

I'll never forget my school production of Twelfth Night. One of the boys in my year, Will Ings, had composed a tune for 'Come Away...' It was haunting, and beautifully effective, and I wish I had a recording. It surfaced in my mind towards the end, and I was nearly brought to tears.

[I still harbour a deep love of the film version with Helena Bonham-Carter.]

Tales from Underground: Post no. 2, Death to the Kindle

A cold day, an ice in the bones day: whether it was this that brought out the hordes of book readers on the trains I don't know, but yesterday was a particularly busy one for those quaint types who read 'paper'. You can't even scroll down the page! Idiots. The Whitechapel platform, morning, contained at least four people stuck in their novels, including Mohsin Hamid's Reluctant Fundamentalist and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. One woman was reading a Kathy Reichs bigger than herself (almost.) Stepping into the carriage, I saw a man digging into the middle of a science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon. He looked happy. Unlike, I must say, the man sitting in the seat that you're supposed to give up to elderly passengers, who was scrolling ferociously through a book on his phone. Its Borrower-sized screen meant he was never doing anything except scrolling. He seemed to be reading a book about Jeremy Thorpe and looked like he was about to have a heart attack. As the train slugged its way towards Hammersmith, a blonde girl got on reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts. Unfortunate, I know, but at least she was reading. We shared a moment over our raised novels, lifting our eyebrows in horror at the conversation of a fellow passenger. Nearby were another Kathy Reichs (these crime people seem to come in pairs) and a Jane Moore.

Post-lunch, I fittingly saw a woman reading Culinary Pleasures on the platform at Notting Hill. A man on the train was reading a book called 'Bang to ...' something. He was shaven headed and wearing a puffa jacket. I think it might have been called 'Bang to Rights'. But I was too scared to look.

So a good enough day already, but then two things happened which turned it into joy: at Victoria, on a train to Clapham Junction, sat a girl reading J M Le Clezio's Desert. She was beautiful, well-dressed. I almost proposed to her on the spot. If that wasn't enough, as I took the Circle Line back to Notting Hill, I spotted a tall, young, bearded man deep in Seneca's Letters from a Stoic. I decided against shaking his hand. His presence more than made up for the slightly sinister man reading a book sitting opposite me, who although he had his book open, had his eyes fixed mainly on me. Perhaps he was trying to see what I was reading.

Day edged into night. I was hungry, tired, on my way to supper at Moorgate. Surely nobody would be reading this late? Surely all those types heading homewards would be playing Angry Birds on their iPads? Not so. Perhaps it was an aberration. Perhaps not. On my carriage was a pixiesh blonde reading, fittingly, Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier; another, equally pretty blonde holding Joyce Carol Oate's The Gravedigger's Daughter; a stately brunette puzzling over The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson; and then, a turn up for Ish, another reading his recent short story collection, Nocturnes.

You'd think that would be it. And yet. Coming up the escalator at Moorgate, two men, one reading a book called The System of the World; another clutching the heavy MI6 tome that was recently issued. I ate my pizza with barely disguised elation.

As a final coda, my trip back home was enlivened by the sight of a young woman reading a book. Was it Millennium? Was it chick lit? No. It was Jim Crace's Devil's Bone. And what's more, it was a library book. Yes! People still take books out of libraries. Insane, isn't it?

So I make that: Paper 19 - Ereader 1. (Addendum: I myself wasn't reading much today; partly because I was so eager to see what other people were reading; partly because I have been reacquainting myself with the albums of Idlewild. But I did spend some time reading the Ellen Bryson.)

Death to the Kindle! Long live the Book! Keep a weather eye out, my friends. There's life in the old trees yet...