Alan Clarke by Richard T. Kelly (Faber, 1998)

Forgive the past beckoning me in but... it was round about 10 years ago this week that I signed off on the galley pages of my first book for Faber and Faber: Alan Clarke, an oral history of the life and times and (TV) films of the great director of Scum, Made In Britain, The Firm, Contact and many more. In great but needful haste I had begun work in early December 1997, calling on Tim Roth at a production office in Soho where he was prepping his directorial debut The War Zone. I finished the manuscript in March 1998, after 3 1/2 months of crazed gumshoe work, interviewing all round the country. But it was the time of my life, at the time anyway, and an honour to do a hugely improbable book-length tribute to a man whose work I venerated and who seemed to embody most of the good things in the world, as was confirmed by my expert witnesses.
None of the press reviews of the book are online anymore so please excuse the self-absorption of my posting the choicest nuggets up here like so:
“A quite remarkable, heartbreaking book… one of those rare movie books that makes you sit up and start reading… Kelly has had the excellent idea of letting Clarke’s mates tell the story, and he has interviewed everyone he could find, from the women in and out of Clarke’s life, to co-workers like David Yallop and Roy Minton, producer Mark Shivas, cameraman John Ward, actors Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, Ray Winstone and Eleanor Bron. There are more than sixty of them in all, and they’re cut together to make up a bewitching portrait of Clarke… Alan Clarke the book is a model of how to write film history.”
David Thomson, Independent On Sunday
“A sort of oral biography of our television times.”
David Hare, Daily Telegraph
“If there is a better book about British television in the 70s and 80s, I have yet to read it. This extraordinary assemblage of interviews, put together without editorial comment like the printed equivalent of a talking-head documentary, establishes the role of Clarke as friend, mentor and unsung champion of all that is right (and enemy of all that is wrong) with image-based culture in Britain.”
Nick Roddick, Sight & Sound
“Alan Clarke was controversial all his life and yet is hardly known, which is surprising when you read what a funny, untamed, sexy, charming scruff he was. The reason he got away with it was his prolific brilliance as a director. Richard [T.] Kelly’s book is a fascinating insight into a man of difficult, testy and passionate views.”
Angus Wolfe Murray, Scotsman
“Not so much a biography of Clarke as an oral history, Richard [T.] Kelly’s absorbing book depicts an uncompromising hellraiser who tirelessly turned his unflinching gaze on the most controversial subjects. It will make you mourn the passing of a TV industry which fostered work as challenging as his.”
John Wrathall, Premiere
“This is far more than one man and his craft, as the very essence of British culture and politics seeps through the text. A vivid portrait is painted of the unemployment and depression that was to influence Clarke and drive him to leave an anger-fuelled time capsule of society’s injustices for future generations to learn from.”
Dan Rider, Total Film

Offshore '97 by Chicane feat. Power Circle/Louise Burton

This tune came out at a point that was just past the threshold of my own interest in house music, i.e. before my tastes got exclusively focused on Richard Thompson box-sets and suchlike. But I post the promo up here by way of a small contribution to the online dance-musicological database; because, Googling around, I note that there appears to be some small historical confusion over who actually supplied the vocals to this track. Well, it's my friend Louise Burton, as seen in the clip. Doesn't she sound great?

Gordon Ramsay: So Macho...

The concept of 'machismo' gets a bad rap in the media, and sometimes in the real world too. For instance I once wrote in a book of Sean Penn's 'authentic machismo', and a (female) newspaper reviewer thought this very notion ludicrous (which made me wonder what her boyfriend/helpmeet reckoned to such views.) I guess that from its Spanish origins to its common English usage machismo just suggests too much in the way of exaggeratedly bumptious behaviour and a chauvinistic sense of entitlement. Obviously there is a portion of personal identity that may be no more than performance and/or masquerade: a fact one expects is understood by all those gay men who affect black leather jackets, and also - one hopes - by some of the rather more slight and unimposing straight guys who affect same.
Still, Norman Mailer fan that I am, I think machismo needs defending now and then, insofar as it can reasonably describe a readiness on the part of certain men to put whatever physical fortitude and strength they are blessed with to good and courageous uses. (To get in harm's way, you could say.) Women are of course entirely capable of the very same solicitude and bravery; one might only suggest that since men tend to be physically larger and more robust then maybe more of an onus falls upon them.
Anyhow... watching Gordon Ramsay's The F-Word last night on Channel 4 I was in no way surprised to see the Great Chef teaching his young son to catch and gut a rabbit, then cooking it in a ragu for the lad and his mates following a back-garden kickabout to which the ex-Ibrox trainee Ramsay contributed keenly. Many people, myself included, love Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares and Hell's Kitchen shows for the big and untrammelled manner in which the host expresses himself while urging people to do better than what they're doing. There's something improving about it. The F-Word, though, is a different beast. Watching Ramsay jet-skiing and ice-fishing for his supper, or getting his hands gory with the primary stage of food preparation, is only what we have come to expect and seems authetic to the man. But this apart, the show seems utterly dogged and weirdly compromised by the awful self-adoring celeb guests whom Ramsay is happy to air-kiss (Last night? Kate Garraway, Jesus H...); and the equally awful crowd of general-public would-be food snobs who are encouraged to sound off throughout the show. Clearly the only thing that can stop Ramsay is Ramsay, so he will go his own way; and the foodie world is inevitably bound up with rich people, however they came to be so. But it always feels odd to me that Ramsay's media persona is bound up with being simultaneously a) refreshingly bullshit-free and b) offering further needless exposure to prime bullshitters.

Nothing If Not Critical Quarterly

This week I have been mostly reading the 50th Anniversary edition of the scholarly journal Critical Quarterly, edited as it has been since 1987 by my friend Professor Colin MacCabe. Colin first put me into CQ in 1996, publishing a thesis of mine about the Italian film/opera set designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. These days I'm listed among two-dozen CQ Contributing Editors (among the others are Simon Frith, Christopher Hitchens, Isaac Julian, Denis MacShane MP, and Jon Savage.) That said, I've not actually written anything for CQ since about 2002. (Where does the time go? But then nor has Nigella Lawson, whose name is also on the masthead for reasons I can never quite remember.)
CQ makes for great reading on the London underground (much better than some free paper with the latest on Amy Winehouse's flea-hive) and the other morning I glanced up from Colin's essay 'Towards A New Cambridge Philology' and thought I saw George Steiner sitting some way down the carriage. If Colin is the cleverest man I know (and he is) then I daresay Steiner is the cleverest I've never met. Both men, funnily enough, have in the past endured unfathomable academic slights from Cambridge University - which seems to me queer, since I thought cleverness was meant to be Cambridge's Big Thing. I know that when Colin taught there c. the late 1970s he had some highly brilliant students, because I keep running across them in their developed incarnations, and not just at CQ events such as last week's 50th anniversary dinner, where one such alumnus - the actor Simon McBurney - read in memoriam (and superbly) a poem by CQ's founder Brian Cox, who died recently. (Of course Colin taught a few twerps there too, some of whom still went on to make their way in the meeja world, but then such are the wages of a Good University.)
This week I think Colin is in Cannes: now unofficially retired from film/TV producing but still drawn to the Great Festival, from which he routinely reports for CQ and where he is usually Treated Right on account of having done some jury service in the past. So in the hope he is having a good one, and perhaps bumping into Sean Penn at some well-lubricated function, I will tonight raise a glass of rosé (or maybe retsina? Whenever I've dined with Colin a la Grec he's usually ordered a bottle of same while pointing out that this was the stuff Homer drank...)

The Jill Jones Fan Club (Defunct)

When I was still a boy (this would be the late 1970s?) I read a newspaper column by the then-celebrated TV reviewer Clive James, discussing some surly broadcast interview with Johnny Rotten (then of the Sex Pistols). James disapproved of Rotten more or less totally, as did most responsible media outlets of the day, and made an especially aggrieved point of how rock 'n' roll - which had brought joy to his own Aussie boyhood back in the days of Bill Haley and the Comets - had since degenerated into an obnoxious disgrace. So much for poor old punk. 'Johnny Rotten' (John Lydon to you) is now older than James was when he wrote that Eeyore-ish diatribe. Rock 'n' roll has never died, and some of its leading early practioners are now pension-age, albeit rich as Croesus. In my teens I found it impossible to take seriously any rocker over the age of 30 - maybe 35 at an absolute push. Now past that upper age bracket myself, I just plain don't trust or rate anybody younger. If I count the 'records' I have bought (or requested to be bought for me as presents) over the last two years, the roster of artists is wizened beyond belief: The Who, Dylan, Springsteen, Levon Helm, Robert Plant (with Alison Krauss, of course)...) Be it said, not all my favourites have to be Rolling Stone standard-issue Rock Legends. I remain loyally devoted to Maria McKee and to Bob Mould, once the respective frontpersons of rowdy young bands I adored back in 1986. And then, once in a while, I will try to touch base with other singers and songwriters of that vintage, to revisit their old stuff, and see if there's been anything new since. A simple task in the Amazon/YouTube era, right? Nope. So if anybody can find me a CD of Peter Case's eponymous debut LP (1986) for a reasonable price I am ready to meet and talk cash-money. Did Test Department's The Unacceptable Face of Freedom ever get a CD release? Or Nile Rodgers' Adventures in the Land of the Good Groove? And then, above all, consider the Strange Case of Jill Jones (pictured above, on the cover of her own eponymous debut c. 1987, and 20 years later at some sort of Prince-related reunion.) I shan't detain you with all the varied reasons for her fabulousness. But I do understand she finally released a follow-up album c. 2001-2, an acoustic set, called One? Occasionally I see it offered unreliably around the Web, priced at $40 or so, second-hand - dammit. What I want to know is how come I can't get away from Leona Lewis and her reasonably priced and utterly pointless recordings, but I can't find the last Jill Jones recording anywhere readily to hand on God's earth? What is the point of music? None of this makes me Mean Old Man Clive James the Second, you understand - just the irate president-in-exile of the Jill Jones Fan Club (Defunct).

"Cool book alert: 10 Bad Dates with De Niro"

It's a nice thing for an old guy like me - and a book with deceptively serious intentions - to today receive a mention on USA Today's Pop Candy Blog as compiled by Whitney Matheson. The idea that anything associated with me could work for fans of pop, candy, and young women called Whitney... well, it takes years off the creaking knee and elbow joints.

Dept. of Boss Ladies: Calling Peggy Noonan

In answer to yesterday's question/offer of civic duty from your correspondent, this in the Wall Street Journal from Peggy Noonan: "White women have been Mrs. Clinton's most reliable base of support and readiest crutch, the superdelegate said. And maybe they're the only ones who can break through, both to Mrs. Clinton and to the country, and tell her to stop..."
Now, here's another question: why is a famous old Reaganite phrase-maker like Peggy Noonan coming on so earnestly concerned about the fortunes of the Democratic Party should Obama not be its nominee? And she's not the only one. Ah, the black arts...? Or is everyone feeling the same dose of common sense right now whatever their ideological stripe?
BTW the photo sees Ms Noonan in the company of 'MediaLizzy', whose very interesting Flickr posts often show her pictured alongside leading GOP pols and comrades.

Ask Not For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ken. You Neither, Hillary... Hillary? Can You Hear?

In the first published volume of his Diaries (recently ranked by GQ as the greatest of all political books, but don't let that put you off), Alan Clark cheerfully records his part in propelling John Major to the Tory leadership/Prime Ministership after the ousting of Thatcher in November 1990. In Clark's mind the mission was partly to secure a properly Thatcherite succession (and here he was deluded) but also, and with more vigour, to thwart the PM ambitions of the noveau riche and left-of-the-party Michael Heseltine, whom he despised, albeit not quite coherently. Clark's crowning moment in the latter respect was to bump into an ashen Heseltine in some Commons back-corridor in the hours after it was clear that Major had won. No words were exchanged at that awkward encounter, but Clark was sufficiently erudite to commemorate it in his journal with a telling quote from Emily Dickinson: 'A great hope fell, you heard no noise, the ruin was within.' If Clark felt any small sympathy for his hated antagonist it was in the knowledge that Heseltine had known of his doom before the results were formally declared. His campaign manager Michael Mates had polled Conservative members privately, and then "brought the numbers" forlornly to the candidate.
I wonder at what point Ken Livingstone received his own private 'numbers' last week, and so set about mentally packing up the London mayoral desk? And who was the messenger? Not his dubious longtime accomplice Lee Jaspers, one assumes. But like Heseltine, 'Ken' will just have to live with the notion that time and circumstance and a few active malefactors just rolled right over him.
And then, post-Indiana and North Carolina, who will bring Hillary Clinton the numbers? Is there any set of numbers she will accept? Or will she be like the evil brothers at the end of the movie Trading Places, screaming 'Turn those machines back on!' even as the room deserts and the security guards draw near.
But basically if they're fearfully looking around for a volunteer candidate-number-bringer in Team Clinton, I am absolutely bang-up for the job, and will do it with a winning smile - since winning is such a big deal in the Clinton Dynasty, even when you're actually losing.
(Livingstone photo by Annette Boutellier)

Ten Bad Dates With De Niro conquers LA and NYC...

... Or at least the Los Angeles Times, in the person of the venerable critic and Clint Eastwood expert Richard Schickel, gives the book a very generous review here. This bit in the New York Post is a little smaller but hell, I'll take it. What further glory could this lead to, I wonder? A rush on copies at the big Barnes & Noble bookstore next to the Farmer's Market in Hollywood...? Hollywood execs giving the book to each other as birthday gifts, or just plain timely reminders of why they first entered the beautiful business of movies...? Or me being hired as a consultant on the next major studio attempt to make a half-decent Hulk picture, i.e. one that doesn't end in a silly video-game fight scene? (The latter possibility because, as Schickel notes, I am a loyal friend to well-meaning but widely despised movies everywhere.) Well, at any rate I'll just have to bide my time and keep grafting until the summons comes from Burbank...

The wizardry of Nicolas Roeg, revisited

Last week I wrote up and passed along what I had been thinking lately in respect of Nicolas Roeg and his mercurial movies. Then I went off on a little jaunt for several days with the wife and bairn... At any rate I'm back in the chair now and the aforementioned Roeg piece is now posted at Film In Focus, the excellent film site I mentioned back in the old days of last month when this very blog was but a bairn itself. "Ah, time...", as Roeg himself might say with a twinkly look in his eye as a precursor to several thousand fascinating remarks on the subject.

Biofuel: Capital's Newest Best & Safest Bolthole...?

Per my previous post, instead of sitting and pontificating around midnight I should have been reading this by Mark Lynas and Ian McWhirter from a recent New Statesman. In summary, though, it remains the case that We Are All To Blame. Or maybe I'm just acting like one whom Norman Mailer labelled 'Desperate Ambrose': the perennial ineffectual moaner, at whom the corporate fat-cats laugh with high scorn, safe in the certainty that if there is such a thing as karma in this world then they will yet be favoured by that process, i.e. such was their evil energy in this life that they will be reborn, as evil men... For these and other such thoughts read Mailer's and Mailer Jr's The Big Empty. (Re. the genealogy of 'Desperate Ambrose', I'm not sure if Mailer re-defined some pop-cultural reference entirely for his own purpose. For another take see Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Any excuse, after all...)

China hungry for meat, the US crazy for fuel

A report in today's Telegraph tells us there is an OFT investigation afoot into possible price fixing by UK supermarkets and some of their major top-brand suppliers (of products such as PG Tips, Andrex, and Warburton's bread, all used and endorsed round my gaff.) Along the way the report notes more generally that "prices in supermarkets have risen by 5.5 per cent since last April, according to official government data... a 500g packet of dried spaghetti has increased by 51 per cent. The price of butter has risen by more than 50 per cent." As a student in the early 1990s I often subsisted on buttered pasta, and students are generally poorer today - massively in debt, like the rest of us - so you do the math, as they say... but the price of food is evidently becoming a problem for the majority in the UK, especially those 'hard-working families' who did so much to install the current government. The crisis - as usual these days - is bigger and wider and worse than we think, but most people have fingered red meat and biofuel as major culprits, the debate usefully summaried by the Independent here. And what action am I taking personally to address the malaise? Tending the moths in my wallet, as usual, and not drinking take-out coffee anymore. (Astounding rip-off. 'Fair trade' my eye.) As in the case of my cousin whose annual New Year Resolution was to give up bobsleighing and ballet-dancing, I'm sure the benefits of my rigour will be striking. (BTW, the photo - by Tim Ellis on Flickr - is of course a figurine of the old PG Tips monkey, before the brand went 'trendy', presumably so as to raise the price.)

Crusaders back in the Financial Times

"Oh, the state of the nation / Is causing deprivation." Had I had been asked 20 years ago what the phrase 'State of the Nation' meant to me personally (and, of course, back then nobody was asking me anything of the sort...) I would have gladly discoursed about either a) various drama series I had seen on television, mainly written by Alan Bleasdale, or b) a mid-ranking recent single by New Order, a band I have always adored and thus forgiven for some of their dodgier lyrics (as above.) But this is Spring 2008, the season of the State-of-the-Nation novel, and it seems that I have written a contender in this peculiar category. Adrian Turpin of the Financial Times, who wrote an early review of Crusaders for which I was massively grateful, has now graciously cited the book again in a long review/thinkpiece concerning various titles, including the paperback of Blake Morrison's last novel, and Gordon Burn's Born Yesterday. For my part I couldn't be more pleased to have my book described by Adrian Turpin as "an enjoyable and unapologetically Victorian slab of social realism." And, to extend the theme of my previous post, I have to say that, as intriguing as I find the figure of Tony Blair, I'm much more interested in Pontius Pilate. The general tendency, mine too, is often to see whatever's happening in politics today as the bitter end, the final insult. And some observers will indeed have seen worthier standards applied in public life. But I don't think there's all that much new under the sun. At any rate, if we the people want to revive or reform our politics then we're obliged to get actively involved in politics, from day to day. As Bernard Sumner sang elsewhere in the aforementioned mid-ranking New Order tune, 'Yes, it's the state of the nation / That's holding our salvation...'

Crusaders' share of Blair in Fact and Fiction...

Hmm... It's getting on for a year now since Blair's resignation. I know, the leavetaking took forever, so let's not rush to the anniversary retrospectives... Still, I raise the matter now not merely because a steady drip of Blair re-evaluations has turned into a running tap because of Gordon Brown's anguished and ungainly recent performances. And not because the whole Blair Conundrum was a key part of the backstory of Crusaders, as Joel Rickett cottoned to very quickly. No, it's because last month I sat on a panel called 'Blair In Fact and Fiction' at the Aye Write festival in Glasgow, alongside Martin Bell, Helena Kennedy and Joan Smith, and as ever with these things, given the time and the format, you rarely come away feeling you've said what was truly on your mind. This eyewitness reporter from the Herald clearly felt that we had all lined up over Tone with the sharpened stilettos out like it was Murder on the Orient Express. ("They all did it!") Indeed the chap mentioned therein who 'stood up for Blair' chatted with me afterward at the bookshop signing. (I hope he found the copy of Crusaders he bought not too yawnsome...) But there's so much to say about public figures of this prominence. Didn't even Garcia Marquez once say he would need a million pages to do justice to Che Guevara...? (Staunch people of the Left who always loathed Blair would shudder at that analogy.) In any event, what I think I said at Aye Write and have certainly said at every other platform occasion is that when in 1996 Blair described Pontius Pilate as the archetypal politician, I thought it was the most interesting thing I'd ever heard a pragmatic/centrist leader say. I still do.

Crusaders reviewed in the Church Times!

Seems like a good match to me... This is the April 18 issue of Church Times to be precise, now on the newsstands or otherwise hitting subscribers' doormats. The review is by David McLaurin, who I believe to be a novelist as well as a (former?) priest. At any rate his take on the novel is very gratefully received: "A big book... but the author transforms the blockbuster genre into something more profound... [It] gives the reader a satisfyingly intense and cathartic conclusion that is well worth waiting for... a fearsomely well written, if somewhat bleak, book."
(The picture is of inside Durham Cathedral, taken by John Dalkin, who posts on Flickr as 'Heaven's Gate.)

RTK Newcastle article in new Prospect (May 2008)

"London to Newcastle isn't rated among the world's great train journeys, but for any returning native of the northeast there are sights along the line that will elevate the spirits..."
The new issue of the excellent Prospect magazine is now on the stands and includes an essay by myself in the 'Witness' strand which somebody has wittily entitled In Search of Lost Tyne. Yes, it's a series of snap-shots of the current state of Newcastle upon Tyne - socially, economically, politically, and culturally. In a sense, because the plot of Crusaders concludes in 1997, this piece of reportage brings the novel's story up to date, and with rather more of a debt to the actualite.
Needless to say there's a great deal more to enjoy in the magazine, including an essay by the South Shields-born historian Robert Colls on the neglected novels of Melvyn Bragg; quite a bit about the 40-year anniversary of May '68; and a long interview with Christopher Hitchens by Alex Linklater, in which it is casually noted that Hitchens enjoys friendly relations with the 'independent-minded' Sean Penn. Any sane/civilised person would want to be the proverbial fly on the wall when those two meet for cocktails.

Pennsylvania primary: the commander-in-chief thing

A week or so ago Alexander Cockburn made a witty point in the course of a piece on his radical site Counterpunch, one that other commentators should kick themselves for having missed. At least, I didn't see it noted anywhere else in the drizzle of Dem-Feud coverage, and I read as much of it as you do... Cockburn was weighing up the broadly disastrous contribution of Ex-President Bill to his wife's campaign, and drew special attention to Bill's "managing to reignite Hillary's Bosnian disaster, where she converted a pleasant outing into an anecdote of courage under fire unexampled since Audie Murphy took on a battlion of German soldiers single-handed. Bill says that Hillary came up with this fictional packet because it was late in a long day and she was kind of tired and not thinking straight. So, as my coeditor Jeffrey St Clair, asks, what happens four hours later when that 3am phone call comes?" Makes you think, doesn't it? One wouldn't harp on it, except that I understand the latest Clinton TV attack-spots harp unashamedly on the theme of "Who do you think has what it takes...?" But, for now The Dream lives on - or do I mean the nightmare from which, one morning soon, we shall awaken?

"Religion is ‘the new social evil’" (Rowntree report)

Did you happen to see this report in the Times? Would have made the old Quaker quake, I daresay:
"Many participants said religion divided society, fuelled intolerance and spawned “irrational” educational and other policies... The findings contrast with [Joseph] Rowntree’s “scourges of humanity”, which included poverty, war, slavery, intemperance, the opium trade, impurity and gambling..."
Some of those old scourges have stuck around, of course. But what do you suppose has got people newly vexed about religion? Perhaps the sense that until recent years, in the UK certainly, religion had seemed not to impinge on any man or woman who had no use for it. Now it's irritatingly unavoidable in the atmosphere. I used to feel fairly glad that I had read the King James Bible and had a working knowledge of theology. At times I could see something in the Marxian idea of religion as "the soul of a soul-less world". You can't be a George Steiner fan (see below) and not have a use for some notion of 'transcendence.' And there is definitely a spiritual dimension to our lives, however one might choose to describe the spirit in question.
Used to, yes. Lately I'm rather coming round to the Bertrand Russell stance. Or as Christopher Hitchens said to Joe Scarborough: "I am atheist. I‘m not anti-Catholic. I am not anti-Protestant. I‘m not anti-Greek Orthodox or anti-Judaism or anti-Islamic. I just think that all religious belief is sinister and infantile and belongs to the backward childhood of the race."
I wasn't a respondent to the Rowntree survey, and don't know what the full report amounts to, but on the basis of the coverage perhaps I can say that as a citizen my views were in some sense reflected?

Newcastle 2 Sunderland 0

My late grandma was one of those people who genuinely "liked to see all the North East teams do well" in the football leagues, and would sit through the entirety of the Saturday final scores just to see how Hartlepool, Carlisle and Darlo had done. This is probably something to do with being from Durham, rather than Tyneside or Wearside. For a taste of a more partisan view, look at/listen to this and this from a packed St James's Park yesterday. Being the North East top dog isn't the grandest bragging right in the game just now, not with the top 4 far from reach and the likes of Villa, Blackburn, and Portsmouth having left Newcastle behind them this season. (Hence the importance of the career plans of the fella pictured above with his adorable little moppet on a startling day back in 2005.) But it'll suffice for the time being. After all, coming 11th or 12th in the top division these days is pretty much the same as coming 7th i.e. you still get nowt, and your passports stay in your drawers, though I can name at least one side for whom 7th place seemed to count as "taking the Premiership by storm" a few years ago. Alas, for me (and for other soul-searching Toon fans, I'm sure) it's Middlesborough who still hold the whip hand in the region, purely on account of a League Cup won as recently as 2004. Whatever they say about the pains of managing Newcastle it remains the case that to be a legend the gaffer only has to win six matches in a season, so long as they're all in the same cup competition. But Kevin Keegan has a bye through any such miserly qualifying process on account of pre-approval such as this.

George Steiner, maintaining the standards

I was 17 or 18 when I first encountered the critical writings of George Steiner, and I don't think I have ever liked a critic better. (I say 'critic' - modestly the man himself discounts his occasional fictions, including The Portage to San Christobal of A.H., but then one can be sure he sets the bar higher than the average mortal.) My favourite titles of his remain Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky and Real Presences. I will never forget hearing Steiner describe the true function of the critic as that of a postman: one who knows precisely where to deliver the missives of men & women of letters. (As I recall, he attributes this image to Pushkin?) And he returns to this theme in an excellent interview in today's Guardian. He also expresses the view that most writing "seems to me too often, in this country, at the moment, a minimalist art. Very, very non-risk-taking. Very tight - often admirably, technically. But finally one thinks of the nasty taunt of Roy Campbell, the South African rightwing poet: I see your bridle, where's the bloody horse?"