04/11/2011 The Review Show

we do with him? Burn him? Tonight on Review, crisis, what

crisis? The world of literature is trading high in a book review show

special. Master of horror, Stephne King,

turns back the clock to try to stop Lee Harvey Oswald, in 11/22/63.

you afraid of ghosts, how can you be when the crime hasn't happened

yet. Polymath academic in a conspiracy against the Jews in The

skal Prague Cemetery. Blue Nights from Joan Didion. I didn't think

people would see it as a love story. From literary exile to national

hero, Apricot Jam And Other Stories published three years after the

death of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This is something absolutely new.

It is the language Russians have been speaking for thousands of

years but none of our writers have used it. And a selection from the

celebrity book shelf. Joining me here in Glasgow to praise or pan

the year's literary offerings, are four critic whose literary credits

are no way of need of a bailout, Greer grorgror, Susan Hitch and

legendary English professor and beekeeper, John Carey. As ever you

can make your own comments, or heart felt grittisms on Twitter.

Our team are sharpening their tongues to respond as we speak.

Stephne King is synonymous with horror fiction, the man who created

Carrie and The Shining, and also Stand By Me and the Shawshank

Redemption, in his new novel he looks to the past for inspiration

and one of the defining moments of his teenage years. On the 22nd

November, 1963, the 35th President of the United States, John F

Kennedy, was barely a thousand days in office when he was assassinated

by the by now legendary lone gunman. Stephne King was a teenager when

Lee Harvey Oswald fired his shot. In 11/22/63, the supremo of the

horror genre asks what would happen if we could change the critical

moment in history. I was sitting on a bench looking at the Syntagma

Sqare brick cube of the Texas book deposry. Come on in, the sixth

floor whispered, take a look round, and take a look at the sixth floor.

There is a museum here, and people come from all over, and people weep

for the man who done what he done, but this is the 60s and Jake Epping

doesn't exist, only George Ambush exists, a man of his time, so to

speak. To come on up, are you afraid of ghosts? How can you be

when the crime hasn't happened yet. Jake Epping is a 30-something

English teacher from Maine. His friend who runs a local diner has a

secret. A hidden store room by transports Jake back to 1958. Al

enlists Jake on a mission to prevent the assassination of JFK.

Jake's new life as George, plunders him into a world with iconography

of the period. A series of entanglements ensues, romantic and

more surprisingly with Oswald him we have. I went to the pantry and

made small shuffling steps forward, pretend you are trying to find the

stop of a staircase with your eyes shut. Close your eyes, it is easier

that way. I did, two steps down I heard the pressure equalising pop

deep in my ears. Warmth hit my skin, sunlight shone through my closed

eye lits, I heart the weaving flats. It was September 1958, two minutes

before noon. So how successful has King been in his reimagining of

mid-20th century America, and has the king of horror brought his

skills to bear on counter factual history.

Stephne King says he has been trying to write the book for 25

years, but completing it has he set himself up as a completely

different writer? I don't know, he has always written a lot of

different types of books. I read this book with such joy, he's a

readers' writer but also a writers' writer, the sentence structure and

the rhythm, and dancing talk as well. What I was very interested in

with the "what if" story, what if Jake had been black or a woman,

that kind of twist to the story. I think at the end of the bok he does

acknowledge sometimes that he's a lot kinder to that period. I think

he came to it with a lot more nostalgia. There was a lot more of

his teenage baggage, it was a conventional hero? It was a

conventional hero, at the end he acknowledges, just in terms of

Dallas, he recalls an incident when LBJ's wife went, and she was spat

on by middle-class house wives, you don't get that sense of real

nastiness in America. What did you make of it I agree, he's an amazing

writer. I wish he could get a grown-up story to tell. The time

travel thing is irritating, for me. Because we know what happened. We

know how the story will have to end. But it is a kind of general thing

of fiction, in a sense, Robert Harris did it in a different way

with FatherLand, this working out of what if, and the thought process

and how things could be different? If we are really examining the

structure of the plot, it has to rely on a tremenduously tenuous

story about the bets he's having on the things he knows, which he

strangely knows, because they have already happened. Except you would

have to have an extraordinary recall to recall they had happened

at all. You go through all of that, you have the elaborate setting up

of why it is, and it doesn't work, and da-da-da. What gets me and

annoys me is this man could write n the most wonderful story about the

50s. I was there, I was a teenager a bit older than he at that time,

and the taste of things, the way they are, the way the wrappers are

on things, the way the music sounds, the way the streets are laid out,

the way the houses are organised, it is all so vivid, and he does it

in such a compressed way. His sentences are packed with

information, but you hardly notice. What about that, evokation, is it

fetishising it slightly? We can't talk about the content too much

because there is a fantastic ending. He goes into the rabbit hole, and

what happens is you meet a man with a card, sometimes it is a yellow

card, sometimes green, this man is sort of a guardian of time. One of

them kills himself. The last time George goes through the man talks

to him about who they are. He says we are not supernatural, we are not

aliens, we are human beings, and we have to keep these streams of

realities in our minds. That is crazy. What kind of human beings

could they be to control reality. Is that craziness necessary, he did

a lot of crazy things in this book? I think the book is struggling

between two different kinds of explanation. There is the what if

strictly science fiction explanation, about going back into

the past. But there is also these time guardians part of, in some

ways, with The King's Speech king book, a more familiar - with a

Stephne King book, a more familiar horror genre, nasty things start

happening if you mess with the past. That works less successfully,

because this past is so substantial and so well imagined, that

interrupting it with strange bits of horror seems irrelevant. Do you

think that is because Stephne King has one foot in his horror genre,

thinking he has this hugely loyal fan base, can I get really out of

that? Or it is habit of mind. A habit of mind that is almost blown

aside by this wonderful story telling and the reality of his 50s.

He should have let it be blown and make it into the science fiction

story. There was the whole measure of story before the main eye

Adventurers of the Year. Did you think there was - event, there was

several pages and for me it was a bit like wading through treacle?

isness radio. One of the points about time travel is when you go

back into the past everything you changed is cancelled, it is always

the beginning. That is very important. And you have to have

that early stuff to get that into your mind. It is shattering, there

is a woman in the wheelchair, they will save her to be in the wheel

chai, she is in out, in out, multiple universes. And there must

be. There are multiple parallel universes. I felt I was getting

three stories for the price of one here. You have the first story

about the murder in family, the other story which is a love story,

and then you have the JFK story. And I loved it, because he's a

master story-teller. I'm not sure I liked the love story. I gagged a

bit on the love story. Sadie is beautiful. From one conspiracy

theory to no, unbelievably it is over 25 years since Roberto Echo

burst on to the scene with The Name Of The Rose, he bursts on to the

scene again with The Prague Cemetery. Philosopher and all-round

Greg carous multitasker, he is prolific, he's known for The Name

Of The Rose, also a successful film starring Sean Connery and a young

Christian Slater. His plam buoyant style and conspiracy theories

continues with his - flamboyant style and conspiracy theories

continues with The Prague Cemetery. It follows a secret agent, versed

in forgery and bomb making, but who is also capable of even darker

deeds. It transpires he's behind some of the many conspiracy

theories in 19th century history. Including offering the protocol of

the members of Zion and putting them into a Jewish cemetery.

interested in a reader that tries to understand not the game of the

mother - murder, but the game of the author, the way in which the

author pulls him or her, the reader to enter the story follow a certain

path. In a way, the real plot and crime, is the one organised by the

author. To trap, to frame the reader. The dark tone of the main

character is set from the start of the book, mainting him as an

unpleasant villain, who neither respects nor trusts anyone. When I

was old enough to understand, he reminded me that the Jew, as well

as being as vain as a Spaniard, ignorant as a Croat, greedy as a

levintine, ungrateful as a Maltese, dirty as an Englishman, unctuous,

and as Scotland rouse as anyone, is adult trous through uncontrollable

lust, the result of an erect tile with a monstrous distortion between

the dwarf build and that. With such subject matter comparisons have

been made to Dan Browne, it has been described as the thinking

person's Da Vinci Code, but is The Prague Cemetery a worthy page-

Turner or just murder. It is all about the author Greer

gror Greer you are a stick letter for his - Germaine Greer, you are a

strikeler for historical - stickler for historical accuracy. Did it

arrest you? It puzzled me, it was meant to. That is kind of

irritating. There is one type face for the narrator, one type face for

the main character, who is theville lane of the piece, and his at -

villain, of the piece, and his alter ego, sometimes his alter ego

and sometimes something else. It is all trickry on the reader. It is

irritating because he chooses 1897, there was someone called that, and

the whole Paris he built full of Jews who occupied the highest

positions in society, and instead her grubbing around with this block,

who lives in a junk shop and fakes documents. Part of it his own

fascination with documents. The fact that he's the scholar he is.

By faking documents you don't actually change anything. The whole

thing about the plotting and the conspiracy and the Stephne King

which you loved, and then you have the Umberto Eco, - Stephen King

which you loved, and then you have Umberto Eco with the documents?

you go on Wikipedia, it says over the Middle East many despots

believe them, as did Hitler do, still believe them to be true, and

it is taught. You need a book simply exposing, very clearly, how

the documents were forged. Why doesn't he do that. Instead of

introducing all this fake history. There isn't a character in the book.

Can the narrative spine carry the weight of all this information and

history and the protocols and so forth? No, because it is a mess to

me. I felt like this main character was like somebody in the corner of

a pub, spouting a story going, and another thing, and another thing,

and people were like stay away from this character, complete low. I got

lost. This has such an exciting premise, this is a scam story, this

should be about conartists, I don't know how he could have made this

story as boring as he did. I felt as though I spent the

evening in bad company. This stuff is disgusting, we had just one

little paragraph of it there, he it goes on for pages and pages? What

about the whole ideas of having an unpleasant central character in a

book? They have to be unpleasant and interesting. This was not

interesting. Umberto Eco's own wife, apparently, said when she finally

read the book, no wonder you have been nasty all the couple of years

when you have been writing the book. I felt I had been nasty while I was

reading it. He ups the ante with it. He ups the stench of it? That is

part of the con, that he can disburden himself of all of this

zenophobic craziness, knowing he's press ago button out there, amongst

the great unwashed, who will actually respond to it. It is a

strange thing that it gives him a license to be so unpleasant. I

recognise this Protestant tag nis son of perfume. He has a sinister

glrb protaganist son of fare fume, he has a sinister gift. If there

was a - perfume, he has a sinister gift. This is a profoundly

misleading book. It is interesting that Umberto Eco

compares himself, he almost says that he's the brainy Dan Browne?

The pride in his own braininess, which accounts for all the post

modern stuff, like the narrator is a separate person, and the narrator

himself says he doesn't know who the mysterious writer is. Come on,

we are not children. It is pathetic and it is trying to be clever, it

seems to me. I think he forgot about the reader and a writer who

forgets about a reader. He says that clearly himself, it is about

the author? Then write your book and read it yourself. It is a post

modern book.Yo Yo see that as post modern. It is meant to deconstruct

the idea of certainty when it comes to historical fact, it is

mischievous. It has its cake and eats it, you have a timeline at the

end of the book in case you get lost, you are wildly lost, the book

finshes and you have an appendix that explains what happens then.

The only nice thing about the book is the food. It is fair to say that

in recent years, life hasn't been kind to the celebrates writer,

Didion de. Eight years ago she lost her - Joan Didion, eight years ago

she lost her husband, the screen writer, John Gregory Dunne, she

wrote about her lost in her memoir A Year Of Magical Thinking, which

transferred to the stage with Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion.

The tragedy went on, her daughter, was in a coma a year after her

husband died, Didion revisits the death. I visited her in New York.

Qintana Roo was a gift to you? thought of her as a gift. How did

she come to you? She was adopted. Out of the blue I met a doctor, at

someone's house, at a Christmas party. He said I understand you

want a baby. I said, who doesn't. He said he had one coming the 1th

of March, come see me if he would - 1st of March, come see me if you

would like to talk about it. I did. So suddenly we were handed this

baby. Did you think you were ready for motherhood? In theory, I

thought I was ready for motherhood. Because I had not the slightest

idea what was involved. I didn't even think, it didn't occur to me

that it involved anything other than clothes. I thought it involved

little dresses. But obviously I had no real clue. But it was the nature

of your work, that you just took Qintana Roo with you everywhere?

She was always with us. We simply, I can't think of any place we

didn't expect to put her in the back seat and go. So she saw a lot

and travelled a lot? Yeah, we were going to Vietnam at the time she

was born, it didn't occur to me at first that it wasn't going to be a

smart idea to take her to Vietnam. But we did. We didn't. You didn't

take her but you could have? Definitely. You talked about the

fact that she was worried and wanted to hear the narrative again

and again, tell me what happened, the phone went and you went to get

me, and what would happen if you weren't in, did that attend her

throughout her life? I don't think I gave it enough thought. Because

it did not, I saw no reason why she should be insecure about being

loved, being wanted. So it did not cross my mind that she could still

be and I think she was. But your narrative also was that you worried

that she some how would be taken from you? Yes. Why? Why did you

worry that? Because I, obviously I didn't think that I, I presume I

worried that because I didn't think I deserved her. You never think you

deserve the perfect baby to be handed to you. But she was. But she

was. I think first of her sitting on the

bare hardwood floors on the house in Franklin Avenue, and the wax

terracotta tiles of the house in Malibu. Listening to the birds on

eight track. The birds in the Mommas ska the papas, Do You Want

To Dance, she would croon that she did. I still hear her crooning back

to the eight track "I want to dance", the same way I still see

the tatoo through her veil. Something else I still see from

that wedding day, the bright red soles on her shoes. She was wearing

Christian Laboutan shoes, with red soles, you saw the red soles when

she kneeled at the alter. Did you get the sense always that she was

fragile? No. I didn't. Or it didn't occur to me that she was as fragile

as she was. Do you think that fragility came from genetics, when

Sheehy vently found her own family? - when she eventually found her own

family? There was a genetic component, but none of us have any

way of knowing it. In the book you talk about depth and shall dough

and changes? That is the most accurate - shallow and changes?

That is the most accurate way to describe her. The particular

personality she has she was always somewhere, there was light on her

that you didn't expect to see, or the light changed. She was a

different person. You expected her to be doing one thing and she was

doing actually another. It is hard to get a handle on her? That is

what I meant by it. It was very hard to get a handle on her.

you feel you knew her? No. I mean I think I didn't know the totality of

her. Did you feel also that you wanted to set things down for the

record? Yes I did. I wanted, it was coming to my attention that I had

treated her as a baby all of her life, you know, that I had been not

as aware as I should have been of how sensitive and smart she was. I

had thought, I wanted to, and so I wanted to say I'm sorry.

You know. This book is about saying you are sorry to your daughter?

But aren't you just being a little hard on yourself? I don't know

anybody who has lost a child who isn't hard on themselves. If there

is anything that causes you to have reason to be hard on yourself,

there it is. But in the end, it was an illness that couldn't have been

prevented correction it? No. could it? No. "I no longer value

this kind of memento, I no longer want reminders of what was, what

got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long

period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I

thought I did. A period during which I believe that I could keep

people fully present, keep them with me by preserving their

mementos, their things, their totems. This misplaced belief now

fills the drawers and closets of my apartment in New York. There is no

drawer I can open without seeing something I do not want on

reflection to see. There is no closet I can open with room left

for the clothes I might actually want to wear. In one closet that

might otherwise be put to such use, I see instead, three old Burberry

rain coats of John's, a swayed jacket given to Qintana Roo by the

mother of her first boyfriend. A cape given by mother to my father

not long after world war II in other closet I find in a chest of

drawers a perilously stacked assortment of boxes. I open a box

and find fo photographs taken by my grandfather as a mining engineer in

Nevada. In another box I find the scraps of lace and embroidery that

my mother had salvaged from her own mother's box of mementos ".

have so much around you, wold wonderful pictures of yourself,

your husband and your daughter, things there. Do you look at them

any more? I look at them because they are right there in wond of me,

but I don't expect to - in front of me, but I don't expect to find an

answer in them any more. comfort? I used to, I used to

imagine that keeping those little family memories around me would

continue to be a solace, but they don't actually. If you look back at

your role as a wife, mother and writer? Oddly enough I think I was

a better wife and mother, I used to think I was a better writer, and I

used to think that I was totally focused on writing. Then I, at some

point I stopped, and I started focusing on when I was no longer a

wife and mother, I started focusing on that, to a much stronger degree.

On reflection. On reflection. were a better wife and mother than

you thought you were? Yes. Isn't that a good thing? That's a good

thing. Joan Didion, thank you very much.

Thank you. I felt from that she was incredibly

conflicted, but the main thing was she wanted to apologise to Qintana

Roo? It came over very strongly. It is a very, very strange book. This

is a woman in acute grief, grief makes us solaceistic, she wrote a

book about her husband dying in the year her daughter died. The self-

concern becomes a real account of her own world, which she enters

into, which has its own logic, not the logic of rationality. It is a

different move from this book, it moves from the death of Quintana to

her life, to account of her adoption, to the tumult that brings

into Didion's mind, all the way through to the tumult growing of

her ageing. But it seems in the end to be uncomfortably about her.

There is something very like that about the work, and very

unenlightning for all its honesty. Do you think there is a lot more

pain than on the page, you had to read between the lines a lot of the

time? Your interview is better than the book, without a doubt, to hear

her talk. The book seems terribly precious to me. The way in which

the culture is shown off, to Quintana as a bed time read, when

she's tiny, she reads TS Eliot's New Hampshire, come on, their

search for some quotation about the tropics, saying they are not exotic,

they are only out of date. Well, come on, what does it mean? All

these dropings of glamour rouse friends, Tony Richardson, who

filled the house with light and parrots and whippets, oh how

glamorous. Then the dreadful death. The death of the daughter. But all

that precious talk is eliminated when she talks face-to-face. Do you

think we know her better than she knows herself? Everybody will talk

nonsense about the honesty of this book. And Didion knows perfectly

well that writers sell everybody out. What they are making is a text.

It is wonderfully light, shimering, complicated, he will dwant, style,

stylistic effort, but you do know that you are not being told things.

She feels guilty about Quintana's death, why? Why? Because Quintana

was diagnosed as obsessive compulsive, border line personality

disorder, who was doing all this to her? She appears like a design -

designer accesssory, they want the child to fit into their life in a

particular way, she's not allowed to be exist. There is a bit where

she says she brought her home in a cashmere fur-lined wrap. One of the

things I appreciated when she spoke about her daughter, it wasn't

filtered through her mental health issues. She wouldn't admit they

were there. She did in the book. The thing is, particularly as I

have recently been through very traumatic experiences myself, and

people in my family, we all deal with grief in a very different way.

We can say we might be saying she might not be honest, maybe this is

her way of dealing with grief? thought she did explore it, we did

get a sense of what Quintana was like as a little girl, she was

clearly clever and funny. It goes to a hotel with her mother and

father and talks to the screen writer about deals. Kids pick up

the stuff at home. She picks up all that. There are some other absences

from the book. One of those is the other people looking after Quintana

from day-to-day. There is one walk- on part for one Spanish-speaking

partner, who yells snake and grabs the child away, and Didion says,

there is no snake. It is the only walk-on part for the many domestic

staff, clearly all around, who was obviously a substantial part of

Quintana's life. Do you think the book can convey loss, I'm thinking

about Blake Morrison's book about his father, so you will lumating

about his - illuminating about his relationship. Quintana does say

some sad things, saying she wants to be in the ground and sleep, at

what age and when it happens you don't hear it. You don't know

Quintana when she was a child. of the things Didion wants to

believe about her, is she showed signs of disturbance from an early

age. She's saying it wasn't her fault, we couldn't do anything

about it, we will never know, and also she died of hospital

infections. Because she had so much medical treatment. So she's not

going to discuss that, because five will get you ten, there is a

billion dollar court case in the offing. We don't know that, do we?

I said five will get you ten, it is a bit.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich was the

most seering indictment of the Soviet gulag ever written. Two

years after his death we have another publication from the

greatest Russian author of the 20th century. Apricot Jam And Other

Stories was written in the years between Solzhenitsyn's return to

Russia in 1994, are and his death, 14 years later.

Now a firm fixture in the Russian School Curriculum, it was just

decades ago when it would have been unthinkable to mention

Solzhenitsyn's name in the Soviet Union. Despite winning the Nobel

Prize for Literature in 1970, he was exiled from Russia four years

later, for depicting his experiences in the Siberian work

camps. Fleeing to the west, his reception from the world's press

was a marked difference from his treatment in mother Russia. Going

on a walk is difficult for Solzhenitsyn getting away from his

exile. Going for a ride in a tram has no respite. It was many years

before he went back to Russia, after Gorbachev allowed his books

to be published. Apricot Jam And Other Stories was one of the books

he produced on his return, they have been translated into English

three after his death. His first son, Stefan, translated one of the

short stories for the book. short stories are binary in two

halfs, they are connected by theme, by character, by plot line, in one

case by the names of the protagonist. They form a body of

work, that he could not have writ without his return to Russia. He

didn't sense - could not have written without his return to

Russia. He couldn't have written them in America, he had to feel the

native air. "I didn't know Russia, I didn't have a feeling for what

mode of expression in a sentence. What sent me on the right path?

Studying legal documents from the 17th century or earlier. When an

accused was being questioned and tortured, the describes would

record precisely and concisely what he said. When someone was being

flogged, stretch on the rack, or burned with a hot iron, the most

unadorned speech coming from his very bowels would burst forth from

him. And this is something absolutely new. It is the language

Russians have been speaking for thousands of years, but none of our

writers have used it". He welcomed readers everywhere, he welcomed

critics, he welcomed readers. Any time a reader opens a book is a

magical moment and one that he always took very seriously and

admired, no matter the country. We were talking about Eco being

almost synthetic, this is about as real as it gets? This is a great

book. He's not Tolstoy, but I nearly is. There were two stories

in the book, I can't read Russian, and I fancy the language is

different, he seems like Tolstoy. The two battle stories,

Solzhenitsyn was in the breakout after Stalin grad, and one story

about an artillery unit that gets cut off from the infantry and gets

wiped out, and one about an acoustic unit that picks up the

sound of enemy artillery and the targets, and everybody shouting at

you. Like Tolstoy, but the loving attention to deDail was terrific.

At the same time, and it is important - detail was terrific, at

the same time, and it is important is the depression of the book. In

the putting down of the peasant rebellion in 1920, he says the

thirst for revenge was so powerful on each side that both sides put

out the eyes of their captives before killing them. You think why

is he on about the pureness of the Russian Seoul soul like Tolstoy

when they street - Russian soul like Tolstoy, when they treat each

other like dogs. He son said he couldn't write this book only in

Russia. The banality that expresses itself in the sets of two stories

is about two lives of Russia, and two lives of Solzhenitsyn in Russia.

He has one life in the Soviet Union and another in Russia it's not back

in Russia, it was the Soviet Union before. A lot of it is about

negotiating what is tragically, horribly, still the same. It is

still the same peasants. You can write like Tolstoy, because it is

the same peasants, having the same horrible time in the same wars.

I think it's Anne credibly ambitious attempt. - it is an

incredibly ambitious attempt. The eight stories that fall into two

halves. The two halves are meant to illuminate each other, you start

with the most difficult one, which is Apricot Jam And Other Stories,

because it is about language, and about the relationship of language

to reality. The writer in the datcha, is Solzhenitsyn, that is

where he ended up, it is his view of himself, as a stoodge, not only

of the Soviets, not only of social realisim itself, but also of the

noble prize committee. He's the cosseted writer who actually feels

that he understands nothing. But then you have the other problem,

which is the peasant uses the funny language. One of the problems with

this collection is it is not translated by the writer, it is

like reading bricks. What I had find interesting about

Solzhenitsyn's work and this collection, I find writers who

write about totalitarian regimes and have suffered the brutality,

what it is is they just talk about the evil of the regimes, they don't

talk about why so many people followed the regimes. I think

Russia still has a very ambiguous relationship with communism. I

think Solzhenitsyn does well what he does well, which is talk about

the evil of those. What is interesting now is we are in

situation where, he is on the curriculum in schools, and reading

a lot of this material, you think, how is that actually taught, what

is said. Because so much is unresolved, so much is so recent?

Absolutely, and never can in a sense be resolved. He says at one

point that you can't change human nature even under socialism. And

the interesting thing is that the story about Zukov, the great

Russian marshall, he takes part in the putting down of this peasant

rebellion with another character in the story Ego, but the details are

telling, in Apricot Jam And Other Stories, the kulak boy, he becomes

a street kith kid, they run through the diner won't eat it and they can

wolf it up. That brings home the hunger. We were talking about human

nature, that human nature does follow a regime. I would like

someone to explore that a bit more. He does also talk about, there is a

sense in which you have already said how being an acoustic

artillery officer, that is like Solzhenitsyn himself, Solzhenitsyn

is negotiating what it would have been to take the other choice, to

go on believing in communism, and then be disillusioned, what would I

have done, these are not bad people doing these awful things. He's

exploring that idea and exploring constantly the division between

good and evil. It is even more complicated than that. In that

story, about the village, that was their finest hour, which seemed to

him, as a red army officer, with a load of built on his shoulders.

will have to come out. After all that, heavy emotional lifting. It

is time to send you into the weekend in a lighter note. This is

a selection of our comedian with his favourite books. I think Robert

E Howard who wrote Conan, a mad bloke from Texas who committed

suicide at the age of 30, but in the age he was writing wrote more

stuff than anyone could in a lifetime. He said someone stood at

his shoulders dictating to him. This one is Wales rb writer of

history and horror from the late 19th century. Most of the stuff is

out of brint for years. This is about a guy who goes - print for

years. This is about a guy who goes on holiday to Wales, and has a

weird experience, and goes back to weird London and feeling he's

perpetually stalked by a small dwarf. I have to pass through that

bit of London every day on the bus, it is more exciting having read the

book. This is Laughing Torso, by Nina, an artist and writer from

fits rovia, all the writers Fitzrovia were on pints of bitter

and cannabis, everybody in Bloomsbury was on champagne and

cocaine. This is the catalogue of the lives of lots of fantastically

interesting drunks in the 20s and 30s.

His show is playing London and touring the UK. Thanks to my guests