Authors Electric

Atticus, The Sunday Times, 21.10.18 Flicking through The Sunday Times this week, my eye was caught by this snide little piece in the media gossip column, Atticus (pic, right): Amusing, yes, especially for Sir David Hare.   It’s not his fault that the public don’t know Woolf’s work well enough to distinguish which words she genuinely wrote and which are the ones that he, adapting a novel about Woolf for the screen, makes her say. How hilarious that Hare’s clever line is now attributed to the author herself! And how naïve of the academic, bless them, to confuse a fictional film with a biopic! I mean, who does that?   No one, obvs.  Except the countless people on the internet who now attribute Hare’s line to Woolf. QED. Richmond - a fate worse than death, as Virginia Woolf (above, Getty Images) didn't say.  Does anyone else hear a great clunk of irony in Atticus’s stonkingly patronising attitude to the academic? She or he is the...

Right, people, a quiz question to get those sluggish winter brains going: which of these quotations is the odd one out? “Then would you read a Sustaining Book, such as would help and comfort a Wedged Bear in Great Tightness?” ... and this is what he wrote:     HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THUTHDA BTHUTHDY. “If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together... there is something you must always remember. You are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. But the most important thing is, even if we're apart... I'll always be with you.”   When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it. A Wedged Bear in Great Tightness Yes, I’m talking Winnie-the-Pooh here.  The most wonderful books for children ever written, no...