Where should it go? Just one of the many unusual pieces in The Museum of Everything

The last chance to visit The Museum of Everything, a marvellous temporary museum currently open in Primrose Hill, is fast approaching—it closes this Sunday, 14th February.

Packed into a warren of corridors, cubicles, and awkwardly shaped rooms, this is a quirky exhibition of marginalised art of the past 200 years, which has at various times been labelled art brut, outsider art, folk art, naive art, visionary art and, occasionally, Sunday painting.

All the work showcased is by untrained artists, operating outside the commercial art world, in remote or impoverished communities and sometimes in mental institutions. It actively promotes a lack of consensus over what art really is, thereby encouraging discussion over where art might fit in the museo-logical scheme of things.

Read Prospect’s art critic, Ben Lewis, on why The Museum of Everything is so important, and the dangers of bringing this genre too far into the mainstream.

For further details visit their site: www.museumofeverything.com

Edward Burra’s Harlem (1934)

Afro Modern: Journeys Through the Black Atlantic
Tate Liverpool, 29th January-25th April, Tel: 0151 702 7400

In 1993, Paul Gilroy, now professor of social theory at LSE, wrote the groundbreaking book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. He identified a network of black cultures surrounding and crisscrossing the ocean, connecting Africa to North and South America, the Caribbean and Europe, all contributing to the powerful, hybrid, syncretic culture of the African diaspora. Gilroy argued that the contribution of this culture to 20th-century modernism and contemporary art has been consistently diminished. “Afro Modern” seeks to redress the balance.

Appropriately for this port city once embroiled in the business of slavery, the exhibition will trace the trade routes of the imagination to and fro across the sea. It will show how the different black cultures fringing the Atlantic inspired Picasso and Brancusi but also gave birth to avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance. In turn, it will explore how contemporary artists as various as Ellen Gallagher, Chris Ofili, Isaac Julien and Kara Walker, have taken the language of modernism and used it to formulate and assert their own identities. The show is part of a citywide celebration, “Liverpool and the Black Atlantic,” but its scope is more far reaching, excavating an undervalued lineage in contemporary art.

Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer

This article first appeared in the February 2010 edition of Prospect

On the same spectrum are two small items of recent domestic technology. The first is a little box with a screen which shows, in watts, how much electricity you’re using. Switch on a light, and the figure goes up by 60 watts. Turn on the kettle and it goes up by another 3,000. Within hours of installing this box—which takes a couple of minutes—your energy usage changes. I discovered I’d been drawing a constant 140 watts for the last 15 years—for nothing (a defunct alarm system hidden in a cupboard, a fax machine on standby for faxes that nobody sends). I now use about 30 per cent less electricity.

The second invention is an eco-kettle. It’s simple—it has a water-holding chamber and a heating chamber, so you transfer from the first to the second the amount you need to heat, rather than being left with a lot of uselessly hot water. It comes with three settings: boiling, 90°C (for coffee) and 80°C (for herbal teas)—so you heat the water to the right temperature rather than boil it and then wait for it to cool. There are about 300m cups of hot liquid drunk per day in England, but most people heat much more water than they need. As with the watt-monitor, it’s a simple way of reducing wastage—which benefits everyone.

It’s also a simple way of sending out a message. Instead of saying “I’m rich” or “I’m chic,” these designs say “I’m smart.” And “I’m smart” translates to “I’m paying attention to the effect I have on things.” Isn’t it good when the display of social intelligence becomes a key design criterion?

Hay Cartagena comes to a close

The day began with an early morning interview with Judith Thurman, the distinguished biographer of Isak Dinesen and Colette, and writer for the New Yorker on fashion and books. We begin by talking about Michelle Obama and fashion. Judith speaks of Michelle’s achievement: like Jackie Kennedy, and unlike Princess Diana, she has understood the need to “mount the pedestal, hold your pose, and create a persona,” to fulfil the role of “old-fashioned consort” to the holder of office. Judith thinks that Michelle has been able to speak to different elements of America, including the majority of the population which keeps to a core of puritan, old-fashioned values.

Michelle’s is a “robust glamour,” though, with none of her feisty, opinionated intelligence reined in, and sexy too—a “wholesome marital sexuality,” as Judith puts it. All this explains her consistently high approval ratings (80 per cent) throughout the year, independent of the vicissitudes of her husband’s political life.

I ask Judith whether the eight years she spent on her biography of Colette were a labour of love, to which she replies “definitely not a labour of love, but a labour of literature”. Clearly there is a selfless aspect to biography, she contends, in one’s quest to understand every last detail and strain to another person’s life; but this is also a project about one’s self in which, as perhaps in the practice of Buddhism, one encounters “objections, impasses, antipathies and idealizations” of one’s own along the way.

Some aspects of Colette’s life (1873 – 1954) are plainly disagreeable to Judith: her occasional cruelty, and acute selfishness, and her far from courageous attitude in the second world war (in which she was successful in playing the system during the occupation to ensure her and her husband’s daily survival, but in which she wrote for anti-semitic publications and would, Judith contended, have thrown her lot in with whichever side had won).

We conclude with a conversation about Judith’s career at the New Yorker, a career in part captured in her recent volume of essays Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire, the Spanish version of which has just been published in Colombia. Judith speaks of the intensity and vibrancy of life at the publication, and of her devotion to writing, and writing well.

Next in the morning, an enjoyable talk between Joanna Coles, editor of Marie Claire, and Peter Florence, about the recent documentary film about life at the magazine, Running in Heels; the publication’s ethical commitment, both to good causes and to promoting fashion for real women with real bodies; the future of print journalism; and dealing with celebrities with all their particular neuroses. It drew one into this largely unfamiliar world of a monthly women’s magazine which sells over a million copies.

I then rush over to the Santa Clara Hotel for an interview with Juan Gabriel Vásquez, the pre-eminent 36-year old Colombian novelist whose novel The Informers was short-listed for the Independent foreign fiction prize in 2009.

It was a wide-ranging conversation, in which Vásquez spoke eloquently about the “deep desire to understand”—human experience, history, memory—which underlies his writing, which extends to two novels, a collection of short stories, volumes of literary essays on a wealth of authors and inspirations (amongst others, he cites Tolstoy, Orwell, Camus, Vargas Llosa, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Conrad) and weekly articles in the Colombian and international press.

We talk about politics, in which—like Vargas Llosa, whom Vásquez much admires—the writer plays an active role. Vásquez has no “compulsion to be in politics”, but argues that “obsessive readers of novels”, like the author, “have a privileged view of society” which necessarily translates into informed political observation and action. He is “radically opposed to violence”, above all, and to the “cult of a messianic single figure” which characterises much of Latin America’s past and more recent political experience. He eschews ideological extremes, pointing to the respective horrors of Chile’s period of dictatorship and Cuba’s persecution of homosexuals and critical intellectuals, and argues for more politically mature democracies in the region which arrive at imperfect compromises.

Vásquez lives in Barcelona, a distance from his native Colombia which was self-imposed at the outset of his writing career. In the early mornings, he writes fiction, “about things that are not there”, enclosed in his study with his earplugs in place. In the afternoons he returns to the real world, to his translations, his literary work, his articles and his family. Asked about his experience at the Hay Festival, he replies that he loves talking about literature and discussing books (”not all authors do”) and that his contact with real readers is a welcome change from the permanent dialogue with the “platonic, chimeric reader” with which he interacts during the writing of his novels.

At the end of the interview, we meander together, past García Márquez’s house, to the Teatro Heredia for Simon Schama’s lecture on “Obama and History”. Schama, dressed in a bright red shirt and jeans, cut a characteristically flamboyant figure on stage, as he delivered from memory a lecture full of effect on Obama’s rhetoric and its place in American political tradition, interlaced with reflections on the ups-and-downs of the presidential campaign, the president’s mixed political fortunes in the past year and the State of the Union speech earlier in the week.

Occasionally, Schama would sit on the floor at the front of the stage, as if delivering a Shakespearian soliloquy or a telling operatic aria; at other times, he would walk backwards, or throw his water bottle in the air to catch it again. The content may at times have been brilliant, a kind of précis of The American Future: A History, but the delivery did seem distracting, almost as if it were a parody of the television persona that Schama has cultivated.

Lunch and an interview with the Americas editor of the Economist, Michael Reid, followed, the journalist’s measured tones, light touch and sanguine demeanour a striking contrast as we discussed his 2007 book, Forgotten Continent: The Battle for Latin America’s Soul.

A core thesis of Reid’s, echoed in Vargas Llosa’s lecture the day before, is that Latin America is at a political crossroads between the “mass democracies here to stay”, in which a “constitutionalist, democratic tradition” has taken root, independent of the political orientation of the party in power, and other countries in the region currently caught up in a kind of populist dictatorship. Reid argues passionately and with evidence for the potential of liberal capitalist democracy, allied with adequate social policy, to take root in the continent to the (continuing) benefit of the poor and the economic growth of the region.

In the afternoon, Helena Kennedy gives a compellingly and thoughtful lecture on democracy in the 21st century, speaking on democracy in peril, the decline of political parties, the disconnect between professional politicians and an increasingly disenfranchised public, the failures of the British political system, the rise of cabinet government and the need to find new ways to invigorate life into our democracies—themes she continued to elaborate in a lecture yesterday in Bogotá at Los Andes University. A capacity crowd seemed to hang on every word.

And then, as a golden sun began to fleck the tops of the houses in Cartagena, one sensed that the end of the festival was nigh, heralding in turn the advent of a rather nostalgic melancholy in your Prospect blogger, faced with the prospect of return to his cotidian life in Bogotá. Nonetheless, there was time for three more events: Michael Reid’s discussion of his book alongside investigative reporter Jon Lee Anderson, who has recently returned from the favelas of Brazil and from Haiti, and the editor of Colombia’s main weekly political magazine, Semana; a joyous encounter between ten authors in the the theatre in which each spoke about their favourite book (amongst others, Vásquez: A Perfect Day for Banana Fish, J.D. Salinger; Schama: The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth; Hector Abad Faciolince, The Leopard by Lampedusa, and Hiob, Job, also by Joseph Roth; amongst the highlights); and then a moving encounter with one of Colombia’s most celebrated vallenato musicians, Leandro Diaz, a blind, Homer-like octagenarian, surrounded by his loving family and group of musicians, talking about his love of nature, and of God, and responding to the marvel expressed by his interviewer, Daniel Samper Pizano, at the vivid description in his music and lyrics of Colombia’s ineffably beautiful nature which he had never seen.

The music which was performed captured, in all its beauty, spirit and simplicity, the whole welter of human emotions that had been explored and experienced by the participants throughout the festival over four days; and as a full yellow moon rose to illuminate the old, now almost empty streets of the colonial city, and the dark sea beyond, it was time to get to the airport and to return to Bogotá.

With YouTube, everyone can be a director now

“It’s 2010—time to get off of the Titanic and get onto the lifeboats,” Kevin Anderson, the Guardian’s digital research editor, told me. I wasn’t pleased. I thought: ”But the Titanic has an orchestra, a well-stocked bar, fine Egyptian cotton sheets. The lifeboats have nothing but freezing cold water.” I was at an event at the Frontline Club which sought to ask how the news industry will survive the next decade. Will the internet save it, or kill it? I came out convinced the internet will be good for journalism, but probably be bad for me, a journalist.

For news consumers, the internet rocks. Wikipedia allows us to find out everything about just about anything—no need to take the bus to the British Library. The best writing about the financial crisis hasn’t been from traditional journalists but rather in blogs from academics like Simon Johnson or traders like Barry Ritholtz. Riverbendblog may have been opinionated and occasionally inaccurate, but it gave a better picture of life in Baghdad in the dark days of 2005-06 than any western journalist could. Ten years ago we would not have heard these voices. Now they are omnipresent.

And that is why the internet is bad for us journalists. It used to be hard to get published. We used to have a limited number of newspapers, magazines, television stations. If you worked for one of them, you had a guaranteed audience, which meant your editors could pay you a decent wage, fly you halfway around the world and put you up in a nice hotel. Today the internet allows anyone with any interest to get his work into the public eye. Naturally, market share has splintered and industry profits are down.

Kevin Anderson continued: “You used to be able to charge monopoly rents. No more.” And it’s undeniably true: the internet has removed barriers to entry and so democratised the industry. With YouTube, everybody can be a director. With Wordpress, everybody can be a pundit. When supply goes up, price goes down. Too bad for those of us who used to be directors or pundits. Probably good for the rest of the world.

Under fire: a periodic attack from within

The peer review process, by which scientific research is accepted or rejected by leading journals such as Nature and Science, has come under one of its periodic attacks from within. This might seem an arcane matter to the general public, but it does matter to us all because peer review governs the quality of medical research that leads to the development of new treatments. The drugs we are prescribed a decade from now for a range of conditions—from cancer or heart disease to allergies—may hinge on peer review today. It can also influence the scientific advice ultimately determining major policy decisions—for example, about climate change.

The problem is that cutting edge research can only be properly assessed by specialists in the field who are, to some extent, rivals and may be subliminally at least motivated to produce slightly negative comments. In many fields there is just a handful of leading specialists around the world who both produce original work themselves and also peer review each other’s work.Such an arrangement may be the only one to ensure suitably expert assessment, but does inevitably elicit bouts of paranoia among scientists when their research submissions are either rejected as a result of negative comments from reviewers, or bogged down with requests for extensive further experiments that may take several years.

The latest complaint seems more than paranoia, however, since it came from 14 leading stem cell researchers in an open letter to all the major journals—journals in which scientists must publish if they want be taken seriously in their field and have their work funded. The accusation is essentially that self interest governs some of the peer review comments and therefore decides which research is published and ultimately taken further.

There is another factor not mentioned in the current complaint, which is that the journals themselves have become much more commercially minded in recent years, and compete for subscription and advertising revenues as well as mindshare. This tends to favour publication of fashionable research—including, ironically, stem cell work, to the detriment of, say, plant biology, where there is equally interesting work going on that may also hold great societal value. At one time scientific journals were little more than repositories for research papers and in effect totally agnostic. This made them almost unreadable by anyone other than scientists in the fields concerned, but did at least mean that commercial factors did not influence publication.

The main suggestion for improving the peer review process has been to publish the comments of the referees with the papers to highlight possible weaknesses and strengths in the research—a measure already adopted by the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) journal, which is in fact published by Nature. But there must also be a case for creating at least some space within the journals for research that is independently selected as well as assessed, providing a mainstream outlet for unfashionable science. After all, history has shown that so-called blue skies research leads ultimately to just as many important medical, technological and engineering breakthroughs as “goal-led” science.

Frayn: attending Galle this year

Thursday: three hours down to Galle with Pradeep Jeganathan, noted anthropologist, shortlisted short-story writer, and member of my “post-war literary” panel. Started Out of Sheer Rage, which is the Tristram Shandy of literary criticism inasmuch as, halfway through, the subject—Geoff Dyer’s proposed study of DH Lawrence—is still “not yet born.”

Woke this morning (Friday) in agony, on the floor of Ru Freeman’s hotel room. Apart from a shared lift yesterday evening, Ru Freeman does not know me from Adam.

Effortful recollections of last night’s writers’ welcome drinking session. Met the man who played the brigadier in the recent film version of The Road From Elephant Pass (a garment manufacturer in real life). Also met Rana Dasgupta, the bright young Delhi-based novelist whom I’m supposed to interview at some point, and his wife, the artist Monica Narula. And met Ulrik Plesner, renowned Danish architect and colleague of G Bawa—until Plesner got married, anyway (the history of Sri Lankan modern architecture, ex-pats included, is a litany of homosexual tantrums). Then (re)introduced myself to Michael Frayn, whom I interviewed a couple of years back—nothing doing, until I mention that he thought I’d come to fix the door knobs and then I discovered he had not in fact adapted the play about which I was supposed to be asking him questions. “Ah,” he says, “yes.” He was smiling, but all the same I made a note not to bother him for the rest of the weekend.

Festival impresario Geoffrey Dobbs brought formalities to a close, effusively welcoming writers of/in all languages, including “Pakistani”. After-party until 1am (these crazy lit. kids!), with Rana, Monica, Ulrik and London novelist Diran Adebayo. Majority of “literary” conversation memorably unfit for print.

First event of the GLF proper, a 10am panel discussion—“Who Do You Think You Are?” —feat. Gillian Slovo, Ru Freeman, Lal Medawattegedara, Michelle de Kretser and David Blacker. Immediately apparent: five people is two too many for an hour-long talk. After moderator’s interventions and audience questions, it averages out at two major statements per panellist.

Nobody tells us who they think they are, and there is way too much literary-type bullshit—“The author isn’t responsible for his characters”, “I don’t choose stories: they choose me”, etc. Line of the hour: “What I remembered about this man was that he was unforgettable” (Slovo).

Power cut on the stroke of 11: in a country reliant on fans, a highly effective way of getting punters to move on. Stagger out in search of coffee, or tea, or whatever I could find (Dyer: “Life is really no more than a search for a hot drink one likes”). What I find is that Galle has a disagreeable paucity of coffee shops. Encounter two art exhibitions en route: one flogging generic “smut-faced urchin” shots, and one of “ball-point art”. Neat enough gimmick; but when I want a ball-point sketch of two people having sex I’ll nick some schoolboy’s exercise book.

Return, partially restored, for Slovo solo event. But it’s a straight reading, and decades of living in the UK have almost totally obliterated her Seffrican accent (except when she discusses “ahrony”), which might otherwise have kept me there on its own merits. Rana sends a beer summons, and I duck out, cursing the fact that no-one here seems to be observing the Poya day ban on alcohol. What might have been an interview turns into a photo-shoot: terribly literary photo of me, which I immediately promise myself never to use.

Back at 3 to hear Mac Barnett talk about the magical McSweeney’s publishing empire. Condensed highlights: their first employee was a carpenter (who made aquariums); bookstores hate them because their publications are rarely the same shape twice; their most recent “book” was a 400-page newspaper; writers get 50% of profits. Barnett’s summary of their business approach: “There are times when McSweeney’s thinks about stories first and business second… I don’t necessarily recommend that.” A full hour of people spluttering in surprise and delight. One woman asks for a job. One guy asks for a publishing deal for a book on Buddhist humour (turns out there is none). Out of my mind on one beer, I offer to publish it.

Wendy Cope at 4:45. As a girl she wanted to found the Women’s Merchant Navy. She talks touchingly of her grandmother. She talks of men who nearly bring you flowers (actually, this has a redemptive ending for us blokes). She talks of making lots of cash from a Jools Holland arrangement of one of her poems. A lengthy, published, confession of love is followed by another confession—that she ditched the chap shortly afterwards. Almost constant laughter, even when she’s fulminating against being designated a “light” or “comic” poet. She reads with wonderful natural rhythm, notwithstanding her exuberant use of tricky forms (I am surprised to find that “triolet” is pronounced not “tree-o-lait” in the French style, but more like the Russian for the loo), and has a flawless deadpan when shrugging off the poncey avant-garde-ists who sell infinitely fewer copies than she does. In response to her straightforwardness, the audience questions are genuine and friendly. I seriously consider grabbing the mike and delivering my tribute… but no. Should be just me and Wendy, I feel.

Up the hill to Closenberg Hotel, to moderate Ashok’s readings from his new book. Ashok is a humorist, but Serendipity, for better or worse, is set in the turbulent Colombo of the 1980s. My job is to ask two or three semi-serious questions every ten minutes, to break up the relentless levity (what’s the opposite of leavening?). It falls flat. Ashok ducks questions he’s happily answered before (in print); the audience lose sympathy with me. Not a success, all told. I sneak away, slightly stung.

Dinner with Pradeep, Rana, Monica and Diran. Excellent company, but booze beginning to hurt. Conversation evenly divided between cataloguing the merits of District 9 and listing the reasons why Diran should never have been one of London’s Top 100 Most Influential People. He thinks it’s “a load of bollocks”. Easy to say when you’re on the list.

Others retire to drink vodka. Midnight looming, I wake every hotelier in three towns, trying to find a bed. Eventually get one in Unawatuna, 10 minutes down the coast: still home and dry before Diran, who is in a kind of palace exile, some 30kms away in the jungle.

NBs for the day. 1. Watching writers dashing around to see their own favourite writers (no discernible hierarchy) is very heartening. 2. It is not possible to be a punter, participant and literary journalist (and bibber) all at the one festival.

In conversation: Ian McEwan

The highlights of Saturday morning were two sensitive, probing and humane interviews of contemporary authors, Paolo Giordano and Mario Vargas Llosa, conducted by one of Colombia’s most celebrated contemporary writers, Hector Abad Faciolince. Faciolince is best known for his autobiographical work El olvido que seremos, a searing account of the political violence in Medellín—the second largest city in Colombia—in the 1990s which led to the assassination of his father, a prominent university professor outspoken in his condemnation of para-military, drug-related violence (a work now being translated into English by the prize-winning translator, Anne McLean).

Faciolince is a generous, kind, and erudite man, and his conversation with Paolo Giordano, in Italian, drew out many of the facets of the 28-year old author from Turin, whose novel La solitudine dei numeri primi (The Solitude of Prime Numbers), has been a worldwide publishing phenomenon. Giordano, a physicist who is to present his doctoral thesis next week, spoke about the tormented adolescence of Alice and Mattia (the two principal protagonists), his literary influences (including Ian McEwan), and the process of writing the book itself. For a young man (enviably) caught up in perhaps unexpected global success, Giordano seemed kind, unassuming, reflective and critically aware.

The Teatro Heredia was bursting at the seams for Faciolince’s interview with Mario Vargas Llosa, the avuncular elderly statesman of Latin American letters, while several hundred people more watched the interview on a big screen in the blazing sun and sultry breezes of the square outside. Vargas Llosa spoke of the demons which compel him to write, and of the obsessive single-mindedness and intensity with which he has forged his novels. Not for him, he said, the inevitable inspiration of genius; rather, writing inspired by travel, reading, interviews, encounters and a deep immersion in the world, politics, the tangled knot of human relationships, and life.

Faciolince sought to understand Vargas Llosa’s recurrent concern with fanaticism in his work, with characters swept up by passion, hatred and an uncontrollable thirst for power. Vargas Llosa contended it was not autobiographical, but rather borne out by his experience of dictatorships and brutality in Peru and across the continent over the past fifty years.

And, inevitably, there was much direct talk of politics too: with Vargas Llosa setting out his vision of a Latin America currently divided between well-established democracies with moderate parties, of both left and right, pursuing liberal market economies, and other countries caught up in demagogic, autocratic populism, primarily of the socialist kind, lurching from one crisis to the next. Vargas Llosa, consistent with his writings and political stance since the 1970s (in which he famously opposed Castro’s imprisonment of the critical poet Heberto Padilla), spoke eloquently of his liberal philosophy, concern for human rights and condemnation of “caudillismo” on the continent. It was rousing stuff and there was loud applause from the audience.

Rosie Boycott’s discussion with Sarfraz Mansoor about the politics of food and climate change seemed a salutary, if comparatively anodyne, interlude in the early afternoon, as we prepared ourselves for further conversations with Ian McEwan and Michael Ondaatje later on. Boycott argued that Britain is only ever three days from anarchy, given our wholesale dependence on a fossil fuel-dependent food distribution system which would collapse with the disruption of our ports or another oil shock, and that politicians should be promoting the growth of more local food, in addition to a reorientation of the currently inefficient (and often cruel and senseless) global agricultural system, which promotes animal brutality and absurdly water-intensive land use.

Ian McEwan’s conversation with Peter Florence drew another capacity crowd in the late afternoon and—hearteningly—touched on almost completely different themes to the encounter in Bogotá on Wednesday evening. The audience was again struck by McEwan’s humour, capacity for detached reflection on his work, and the generosity with which he shared his knowledge and appreciation of other authors.

Inter alia, McEwan spoke of the composition of Saturday, which began when the image came to him of a man, naked, standing at his bedroom window in the depth of night, his wife asleep in the bed by his side, contemplating London’s night sky, and of his subsequent, in-depth research accompanying a neurosurgeon in his work for several months to learn more about the brain. Speaking of the structure of his novels, he differentiated between their beginnings: the way in which Atonement, for example, begins with a slow setting-out of the psychological background of the characters, whereas Enduring Love, and Saturday, like Mozart’s Haffner Symphony, begin with a dramatic incident or expression and then the themes are developed. Interesting, too, that Saturday should depict a happy marriage; McEwan found it a challenge to write, given his wider concern for the failure to communicate and frailty of the majority of human relationships he depicts. He cited Tolstoy’s epiphanous description of the early days of marriage in Anna Karenina as a uniquely sun-lit, verosimilitudinous case in point.

There was some discussion of his films, in which McEwan spoke of his screenplays and of the success of the different realisations of his novels that exist (the only caveat perhaps some aspects of Enduring Love, although the director did achieve the film he wanted to make); also of On Chesil Beach, and of his latest novel on climate change, which hits the shelves in a week. The context for the book grew out of McEwan’s salutary (if dispiriting) experience on a boat in the Arctic with writers and scientists a few years ago. In the evenings, after days in minus 40 degree cold, his fellow travellers and he would have lengthy, earnest discussions putting the world to rights, working out the necessary international arrangements to reduce climate change consistent with the climate science and the evidence before their eyes. Simultaneously, and as the week progressed, the storage room in which the group kept their essential kit (gloves, thermals, coats, etc.) became ever more disordered, until such time as complete pandemomium had taken over and some of the group were not able to leave the boat on their daily expeditions for wont of kit.

Despite the inevitable reflections ensuing from this experience, implicit in his rendering of the tale and the audience’s laughter, McEwan contended he was an optimist, and that the luxury of pessimism was a luxury of youth (as a twenty-something-year-old, he would welcome the likely arrival of nuclear obliteration with a kind of passionate glea).

The consoling, mellifluous voice and instruments of Mara Carlyle were balm to the soul after the McEwan lecture, and so was the gentle voice, and poetic language, of Michael Ondaatje, in conversation with Juan Gabriel Vásquez, an hour later. Ondaatje spoke compellingly about his work, the gaps between his novels, the experience of working with Minghella on The English Patient, his poetry, and the joy he obtains from editing his twice-yearly literary journal The Brick.

The British Ambassador and his wife, John and Marion Dew, then hosted a drinks party in the sixteenth-century Palace of the Inquisition, in which the mojitos flowed, and then authors and pundits alike—including this lowly Prospect blogger—danced the night away under a full and golden moon overlooking the old city.