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contributors Neil Armstrong is a journalist. Oliver Balch is author of India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation. Shahidha Bari is Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. She is writing a book on the philosophy of dress. Stephen Bates, a former senior correspondent for The Guardian, is the author of The Poisoner: The Life & Crimes of Victorian England’s Most Notorious Doctor. David Bodanis’s books include Einstein’s Greatest Mistake: A Biography. He is writing How Good Guys and Bad Guys Lose. Charlotte Bolland is curator of 16th-century collections at the National Portrait Gallery. William Brodrick was a barrister before becoming a novelist. He also writes as John Fairfax. Blind Defence was published in April. Christopher Coker is Professor of International Relations at the LSE. Ian Critchley is a freelance writer and critic. Suzi Feay is associate editor of the London Magazine. Christopher Fletcher is Keeper of Special Collections at the Bodleian Library and Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. Clare Griffiths is Professor of Modern History at Cardiff University. Angus Hawkins is Fellow of Keble College and Professor of Modern British History at the University of Oxford. Simon Heffer’s most recent book is The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880–1914. Robert Irwin’s novel Wonders Will Never Cease was published in 2017. Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography was published in March this year. Kevin Jackson’s latest book, Bloke’s Progress, illustrated by Hunt Emerson, was published in May. John Man has written several books about Mongolia and its empire. Genghis Khan: Life, Death & Resurrection is a bestseller in twenty-three languages, including Mongolian. His latest book is Amazons. Jessica Mann is enjoying being back in London after nearly fifty years in Cornwall. Jurek Martin is a former Washington bureau chief and columnist for the Financial Times. Daniel Matlin is Senior Lecturer in US history at King’s College London and the author of On the Corner: African American Intellectuals & the Urban Crisis (Harvard). He is writing a book about ideas of Harlem in the 20th century. Frank McLynn’s historical novel on Amundsen will be published shortly. Jonathan Meades’s Pedro & Ricky Come Again is being crowdfunded via Unbound. Ramita Navai is the author of City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death & the Search for Truth in Tehran. Pamela Norris is currently working on a book about women artists. Richard Norton-Taylor is a former defence and security editor of The Guardian. He is writing an account of his fifty years in journalism. Susan Owens is a writer and art historian, and a former curator of paintings at the V&A. Her most recent book is The Ghost: A Cultural History (Tate). Jason Pearl is Associate Professor of English at Florida International University. Lucy Popescu is the editor of A Country to Call Home (Unbound), focusing on the experiences of refugee children. Richard V Reeves is Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Atlantic Books, 2007). Glenn Richardson is Professor of Early Modern History at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. Lucian Robinson is a freelance writer and critic. Declan Ryan’s debut pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series in 2014. Julianne Schultz is co-editor, with Jane Camens, of Commonwealth Now (Text, 2018). She is Professor of Media and Culture at the Griffith University Centre for Social and Cultural Research. Elisa Segrave is the author of The Diary of a Breast, Ten Men and The Girl from Station X. She is currently writing a black comic diary based on two years with her son, who has Asperger’s syndrome. Miranda Seymour is a biographer and critic. Her most recent book, In Byron’s Wake, is published by Simon & Schuster. D J Taylor’s most recent novel, Rock and Roll is Life: The True Story of the Helium Kids by One Who Was There, is published by Constable. Peter Thonemann teaches Greek and Roman history at Wadham College, Oxford. Adrian Tinniswood’s The Long Weekend: Life in the English Country House Between the Wars is out in paperback. Behind the Throne will be published in September. Martin Vander Weyer is business editor of The Spectator. Richard Vinen teaches history at King’s College London. Catriona Ward’s debut, Rawblood, won Best Horror Novel at the 2016 British Fantasy Awards and was shortlisted for the Author’s Club Best First Novel Award. Her second novel, Little Eve, will be published this month. Adrian Nathan West is a literary translator and author of The Aesthetics of Degradation. His translations include Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny, Rainald Goetz’s Insane and Juan Benet’s Construction of the Tower of Babel. David Wheatley’s most recent poetry collection is The President of Planet Earth. Sara Wheeler’s book about Russia, Mud and Stars, will be published by Cape. Philip Womack’s The Arrow of Apollo is being crowdfunded via Unbound. Imogen Woodberry is a PhD student at the Royal College of Art and literary criticism editor at Review 31. Literary Review | july 2018 4
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diary d j taylor Whatever Happened to the Establishment? Even today, in a world where literary culture can seem as fragmented and diffuse as leaves strewn across an autumnal lawn, pundits still talk animatedly about ‘the literary establishment’. Twenty years ago, if asked to pronounce on this tantalising abstract and the identities of the people who might be supposed to belong to it, I could have come up with a plausible set of names: the Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford; the literary editor of the Sunday Times; grand book-world panjandrums such as Malcolm Bradbury and A S Byatt; a biographer or two… You could see them gathered together at literary parties, and the effect on any newcomer to the scene could be deeply intimidating. I can remember, aged about thirty, walking into the Random House boardroom. A publisher seized my hand, gestured to the elderly couple on either side of her and murmured, ‘David, may I introduce you to Sir Victor Pritchett and Dame Iris Murdoch?’ I nearly fainted on the spot. notice – John Carey, let us say, performing one of his eviscerations in the Sunday Times – is a big event, and most of the books featured in the national press are not so much reviewed as merely endorsed. Twenty years ago the young writer worried about getting bad reviews (as an example of quite how bad they could be, I should say that I was once accused of writing a novel that was ‘as much use as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking competition’). These days he or she worries about getting reviewed at all. These days, alas, if asked to identify the members of the literary establishment, I wouldn’t have a clue. No disrespect to the holder of that exacting office, but I have no idea who the current Merton Professor is. Andrew Holgate, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, does his very best for the boxes of books flung weekly in front of him, but you doubt that he would want to be described as belonging to the establishment, literary or otherwise. Bradbury has been dead these eighteen years and it would be hard to think of a contemporary literature don who operates in quite so many fields or wields quite so much power. Meanwhile, the kind of literary parties at which Malcolm, Antonia, Iris and all the other titans of my youth used to luxuriate while timorous wannabes looked on have more or less ceased to exist. It is not, here in 2018, that literature doesn’t still have its controlling forces; it is just that they no longer sit in newspaper offices or Oxbridge common rooms. You have a suspicion that today’s literary establishment, if such a thing exists, consists of creative writing tutors at new universities, grant-awarding bodies and festival convenors. Only the other day I was invited to attend the launch of the National Centre for Writing (sponsors: the University of East Anglia, Norwich City Council, the Arts Council), with the promise of drinking fizzy wine and listening to a talk by Ali Smith. This looked like a perfect example of the new arrangements in action. I didn’t go. As for the power that the old literary establishment possessed, much of it was thought to reside in the world of book reviewing. Back in the 1990s I had several acquaintances, most of them living outside London, who genuinely believed that what got reviewed in national newspapers and weekly magazines was the result of half a dozen book-world eminences meeting in a smokefilled room to apportion favours to their friends and line up hatchet jobs for provincial upstarts they disliked. These days book reviewing – largely as a consequence of the pressures on space – has, with certain notable exceptions, grown piecemeal and anodyne. A bad If you were a member of the old-style literary establishment back in the bad old days of Professor Bradbury et al, it was at least possible to make a living out of it. In the late 1980s – a boom time for arts journalism, with new newspapers and acres of pages to fill – a top-notcher of the trade who wrote for three or four newspapers and took on any commission offered could make £15,000 a year. As for the conditions that prevail in the cashstrapped world of the 21st century, not long ago I found myself talking to James Marriott, the deputy books editor of The Times. Marriott, busy researching a grim-sounding feature on ‘the cost of letters’, wanted some details of the kind of payment freelance writers can expect these days for the tasks they undertake. I could tell, as the conversation wound on, that Marriott was startled. In fact, by about halfway through our chat, he had become narrowly antistrophic. I would relate just how much the Daily X paid for a thousand words and he would reply, in somewhat shocked tones, ‘But you can’t live on that!’ No more you can. A couple of years ago, when I published a book that dwelt on, among other topics, just how precarious the freelance literary life had become, the man who reviewed it for the Independent on Sunday spent a fair part of the piece complaining that, given the amount of time it had taken him to read the book and write the review, the whole exercise was a loss leader. It was difficult to disagree. By and large you write a piece of literary journalism these days not to make any money out of it but to advertise your talents, show the world that you still exist or convince your mother that you haven’t entirely wasted your life. On the other hand, the first cheque I ever received for a piece of writing – prize money I won in a New Statesman competition – was for £1. As Anthony Powell used to remark about restaurant food or wine bottles of dubious provenance, it could all be a great deal worse. Naturally, the idea of a literary establishment – white, male, superior and patrician – featured heavily in the row that followed Lionel Shriver’s Spectator article mocking a recent Penguin Random House diversity initiative. Of the many disapproving articles in liberal newspapers, by far the funniest came from Hanif Kureishi, who had a whale of a time in The Guardian fulminating about Oxbridge elites, their ‘lackeys’ and their determination to exclude minorities from the party. Well, I was scrabbling for a foothold on the literary world’s overcrowded north face in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the time Kureishi made his debut, and I can tell you that the literary establishment back then had no greater pet. r july 2018 | Literary Review 5

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diary d j taylor

Whatever Happened to the Establishment? Even today, in a world where literary culture can seem as fragmented and diffuse as leaves strewn across an autumnal lawn, pundits still talk animatedly about ‘the literary establishment’. Twenty years ago, if asked to pronounce on this tantalising abstract and the identities of the people who might be supposed to belong to it, I could have come up with a plausible set of names: the Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford; the literary editor of the Sunday Times; grand book-world panjandrums such as Malcolm Bradbury and A S Byatt; a biographer or two… You could see them gathered together at literary parties, and the effect on any newcomer to the scene could be deeply intimidating. I can remember, aged about thirty, walking into the Random House boardroom. A publisher seized my hand, gestured to the elderly couple on either side of her and murmured, ‘David, may I introduce you to Sir Victor Pritchett and Dame Iris Murdoch?’ I nearly fainted on the spot.

notice – John Carey, let us say, performing one of his eviscerations in the Sunday Times – is a big event, and most of the books featured in the national press are not so much reviewed as merely endorsed. Twenty years ago the young writer worried about getting bad reviews (as an example of quite how bad they could be, I should say that I was once accused of writing a novel that was ‘as much use as a one-legged man in a butt-kicking competition’). These days he or she worries about getting reviewed at all.

These days, alas, if asked to identify the members of the literary establishment, I wouldn’t have a clue. No disrespect to the holder of that exacting office, but I have no idea who the current Merton Professor is. Andrew Holgate, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, does his very best for the boxes of books flung weekly in front of him, but you doubt that he would want to be described as belonging to the establishment, literary or otherwise. Bradbury has been dead these eighteen years and it would be hard to think of a contemporary literature don who operates in quite so many fields or wields quite so much power. Meanwhile, the kind of literary parties at which Malcolm, Antonia, Iris and all the other titans of my youth used to luxuriate while timorous wannabes looked on have more or less ceased to exist.

It is not, here in 2018, that literature doesn’t still have its controlling forces; it is just that they no longer sit in newspaper offices or Oxbridge common rooms. You have a suspicion that today’s literary establishment, if such a thing exists, consists of creative writing tutors at new universities, grant-awarding bodies and festival convenors. Only the other day I was invited to attend the launch of the National Centre for Writing (sponsors: the University of East Anglia, Norwich City Council, the Arts Council), with the promise of drinking fizzy wine and listening to a talk by Ali Smith. This looked like a perfect example of the new arrangements in action. I didn’t go.

As for the power that the old literary establishment possessed, much of it was thought to reside in the world of book reviewing. Back in the 1990s I had several acquaintances, most of them living outside London, who genuinely believed that what got reviewed in national newspapers and weekly magazines was the result of half a dozen book-world eminences meeting in a smokefilled room to apportion favours to their friends and line up hatchet jobs for provincial upstarts they disliked. These days book reviewing – largely as a consequence of the pressures on space – has, with certain notable exceptions, grown piecemeal and anodyne. A bad

If you were a member of the old-style literary establishment back in the bad old days of Professor Bradbury et al, it was at least possible to make a living out of it. In the late 1980s – a boom time for arts journalism, with new newspapers and acres of pages to fill – a top-notcher of the trade who wrote for three or four newspapers and took on any commission offered could make £15,000 a year. As for the conditions that prevail in the cashstrapped world of the 21st century, not long ago I found myself talking to James Marriott, the deputy books editor of The Times. Marriott, busy researching a grim-sounding feature on ‘the cost of letters’, wanted some details of the kind of payment freelance writers can expect these days for the tasks they undertake.

I could tell, as the conversation wound on, that Marriott was startled. In fact, by about halfway through our chat, he had become narrowly antistrophic. I would relate just how much the Daily X paid for a thousand words and he would reply, in somewhat shocked tones, ‘But you can’t live on that!’ No more you can. A couple of years ago, when I published a book that dwelt on, among other topics, just how precarious the freelance literary life had become, the man who reviewed it for the Independent on Sunday spent a fair part of the piece complaining that, given the amount of time it had taken him to read the book and write the review, the whole exercise was a loss leader. It was difficult to disagree. By and large you write a piece of literary journalism these days not to make any money out of it but to advertise your talents, show the world that you still exist or convince your mother that you haven’t entirely wasted your life. On the other hand, the first cheque I ever received for a piece of writing – prize money I won in a New Statesman competition – was for £1. As Anthony Powell used to remark about restaurant food or wine bottles of dubious provenance, it could all be a great deal worse.

Naturally, the idea of a literary establishment – white, male, superior and patrician – featured heavily in the row that followed Lionel Shriver’s Spectator article mocking a recent Penguin Random House diversity initiative. Of the many disapproving articles in liberal newspapers, by far the funniest came from Hanif Kureishi, who had a whale of a time in The Guardian fulminating about Oxbridge elites, their ‘lackeys’ and their determination to exclude minorities from the party. Well, I was scrabbling for a foothold on the literary world’s overcrowded north face in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the time Kureishi made his debut, and I can tell you that the literary establishment back then had no greater pet. r july 2018 | Literary Review 5

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