Hatchet job of the year
“To ensure that readers derive full therapeutic benefit from his love story, [Alain] de Botton regularly inserts sections that profusely spell out in italics what his characters’ attitudes and actions signify. Turning its pages, you come to dread the sight of yet another chunk of de Botton’s italicised opinions moving towards you.
Rarely can fictional characters have found it so difficult to get a word in edgeways...Even the couple’s livelier moments are swathed in psychobabble. On a flight to Amsterdam they ‘elope to the toilet’ for sex that is ‘symbolically to free them from both the punishing dichotomy between dirty and clean, bad and good’. Sadly, there isn’t a scene in which they have to explain this to the cabin crew.
Describing de Botton as a thinker is like calling someone who just about knows how to turn on a tap a hydraulic engineer. Insights are glaringly obvious... Intermixed with the banality are hackneyed recyclings of notions from Plato and Freud... The ‘real love story’ in this novel is that between de Botton and his own didactic voice.”
Peter Kemp reviews Alain de Botton’s novel The Course of Love, The Sunday Times
Literary politician of the year
“Darling, let us spend the night, / Sashay past St Mary’s Castle, / Home to bed, dim the light, / I’ll move your world throughout the night, / Oh, honeyed words are most enticing, / Loving you is so exciting. / But why dear heart, did you not mention, /What we’ll do for contraception? / ‘Don’t you worry, we’ll be fine, / ‘Take a risk, just this time, / ‘Tonight’s for pleasure, take a chance, / ‘Think of now, and our romance.’ / Oh, darling you are less appealing. / What you say is so revealing, / If risk is in your mood and speech, / How about bingo on the beach?”
Loving You Is So Exciting, an award-winning poem on safe sex by the future home secretary, Amber Rudd, quoted in The Sunday Times
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Least successful celebrity encounter
“[At a party she hosted] Björk sat on the floor by a ghetto blaster, surrounded by CDs, playing one song after another. I was so tired I could hardly stand. I slumped at the top of the staircase, leaned my head against the banisters and closed my eyes. But I didn’t sleep, something was rising from within, from my stomach and up through my chest, soon it would be in my throat. I jumped to my feet, ran to the bathroom, bent over the toilet bowl and spewed up a magnificent orange and yellow cascade that splashed everywhere.”
Karl Ove Knausgaard looks back in Some Rain Must Fall
Pseud of the year
“Her trip to the North Pole sounds promising, until you read: ‘My name is Silence. Silence is my bivouac, and my supper is sipped from bowls. I robe myself each morning in loose strings of stones. My eyes are stones; a chip from the pack ice fills my mouth. My skull is a polar basin; my brain pan grows glaciers.’”
From a review by Christopher Hart of Annie Dillard’s The Abundance, The Sunday Times
Runner-up
“The pages [of Rupert the Bear books] are full of chthonic unquiet; the weird figure, including an ambulatory tree and Raggety, the avatar of unfriendly undergrowth; hedgerow gnosis; and, repeatedly, the existentially destabilising dark sublime. Nutwood is a place of the most thoroughgoing, frankly twee picturesque — and it borders an infinite void.”
China Mieville, The Guardian
Commended
“Nothing can happen to us while we are watching a football match: as in the advantageous frontal proximity of a woman’s sexual parts in certain positions of the act of love, which instantly disperses the dread of death, which anaesthetises it and melts it away into the moisture and sweetness of the embrace, football, while we are watching it, holds us radically at a distance from death. I am pretending to write about football, but I am writing, as always, about the passing of time.”
From Football, by the Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint
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Correction of the year
“An earlier version of this review [of a memoir by the TV news anchor and debate moderator Megyn Kelly] quoted incorrectly from comments made by Donald J Trump after the first presidential debate. In describing [Kelly], he said she had ‘blood coming out of her wherever’, not ‘blood coming out of her...whatever’”
New York Times
Runner-up
“A review of a biography of the former editor of the Observer contained a number of errors. In the article we suggested that William Waldorf Astor was named after a hotel, when in fact his name referred to the family’s native Rhineland village. He didn’t build Cliveden, as we suggested, but bought it, and he didn’t sack the editor of the Observer for spiking his contributions. We said Katharine Whitehorn was women’s editor of the Observer when in fact she was a columnist. We said Patrick Leigh Fermor compared David Astor to Disney’s Pluto; Fermor actually compared the writer Philip Toynbee to that cartoon character. Terence Kilmartin replaced Jim Rose as Observer literary editor, not JC Trewin. During the war, David Astor didn’t merely suffer ‘a mild attack of dysentery’ as suggested in the review. In fact he was wounded in action during a German ambush in the Ardennes... Astor was awarded the Croix de Guerre.”
The Guardian corrects Roger Lewis’s review of David Astor: A Life in Print
Best of the Bad Sex Award shortlist
“When his hand goes to my breasts, my feet are envious. I slide my hands down his back, all along his spine...to the audacious swell below. His finger is inside me, his thumb circling, and I spill like grain from a bucket... I am pinned like wet washing with his peg. ‘Till now, I thought the sweetest sound I could ever hear was cows chewing grass. But this is better.’ He sways, and we listen to the soft suck at the exact place we meet.”
From The Butcher’s Hook by the former Blue Peter presenter Janet Ellis, which was unfairly denied first place in the Bad Sex Award by a passage from Erri De Luca
Underwear writing of the year
“She climbed on top. [Reacher] reached behind her and unhooked her bra. She rolled away and lay on her back and peeled her panties off. He did the same, arching one way, curling the other.”
From Night School, Lee Child’s 21st Jack Reacher novel, and the first to out him as wearing panties
Runner-up
“Focused on most obsessively are the characters’ sexual twists and turns. The ups and downs of Eily’s knickers are so attentively charted that they begin to seem like characters themselves: ‘down to knickers’, ‘manhandled knickers’, ‘knickers pushed to the side’, ‘knickers right off’. Eily’s encounters with Stephen are so relentlessly sexualised that when she says ‘I stare at his Chekhov’, it takes a moment to realise she’s talking about a book.”
Peter Kemp reviews Eimear McBride’s The Lesser Bohemians, The Sunday Times
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Sentence of the year
“I sucked the musk of his armpit like hummingbird nectar.”
From LS Hilton’s art-world bonkbuster Maestra
Most sensitive author
“According to his ex-wife Padma Lakshmi [Salman Rushdie] required consolation every year that he did not win the Nobel prize in literature... Lakshmi told People magazine that her success as a television host dismayed her husband... When she showed him that she had made the cover of Newsweek, he replied: ‘The only time Newsweek put me on their cover was when someone was trying to put a bullet in my head’... She told the magazine that as their marriage soured, he referred to her as ‘a bad investment’.”
Report in The Times
Bitchiest author
“Peter Sekirin’s biography of Chekhov relates an anecdote in which the elderly Tolstoy, who was bedridden with illness, whispers to Chekhov: ‘You know, I hate your plays. Shakespeare was a bad writer, and I consider your plays even worse than his.’ ”
From article on Russian lovers and haters of the Bard, Russia Behind the Headlines
Worst literary party
“I���d planned it [my book launch] so carefully. The gallery, invitations, canapés; the illustrations on the walls to sell for a myeloma charity. I’d even hired Luke to make me up as an exotic bird for the event with black plumage and yellow legs. Well...it’s a funny old book. Almost no one RSVP’d, then only a few bought a painting; no press showed up, not even Jewish Quarterly; then someone elderly passed out and 999 said an ambulance would be 80 minutes for an assessment! Outside, we couldn’t find a restaurant for 10 stragglers who wanted cheering up, so Guido and I went home to beans on toast and rice pudding from a tin.”
Maureen Lipman, New Statesman
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Most ill-advised rejection letter
“We have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we could not publish it with commercial success.”
From a reply to JK Rowling (revealed by her on Twitter) by Constable & Robinson rejecting her pseudonymous crime novel The Cuckoo’s Calling. The letter continued with a series of tips for its ostensibly inexperienced author Robert Galbraith
Unluckiest author’s children
“[By 7am] the children will come in and leap into our bed. Our oldest, Helena, is 14, Theodore’s 12, Halcyon’s 10 and the twins, Hero and Xanthe, are 8.”
From A Life in the Day, by the historian and 2016 Man Booker prize chairwoman Amanda Foreman, in The Sunday Times
Collector’s treat of the year
“A special limited first edition of Nutshell signed by [Ian McEwan] comprising 100 copies printed on Logan Book Wove 150gsm paper. Numbers 1 to 75 are quarter-bound in Harmatan Sea Blue goatskin with letterpress-printed patterned sides designed by Eric Ravilious ... All copies come with head and tail bands and Fabriano Tiziano endpapers and are housed in a suede-lined Dubletta slipcase which also features the Ravilious design. Full Leather £375, quarter £175.”
London Review Bookshop advert
House-proud author of the year
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“[Jilly Cooper] lives in a 14th-century monastery near Stroud... Hoarder-level stalagmites of dusty books and trinkets are everywhere. As I wait in the sitting room, I count at least 70 animal knick-knacks, foxes, badgers, chickens and dogs, dogs, dogs — open any cupboard and a dog corpse could fall on top of you. It is a crumbling dog mausoleum, with an actual pet cemetery at the bottom of the garden where all Jilly’s dogs are buried. She seems to prefer animals to people and has reached a chilling point where she genuinely thinks animals are human, so in [her new] book we have horses holding book signings and drinking Sauternes, appearing as godparents, even opening supermarkets.”
From interview by Camilla Long, The Sunday Times
Best book signing encounter
“One queue member [at a signing at a comic book festival] tells [Margaret] Atwood she doesn’t know who she is, hasn’t read any of her books, and wants to know which she should start with. The author shoots her a stare. ‘So you want me to say who I am. Well, I’m secretly Glinda the Good Witch in disguise, and the best novel that I wrote is called The Iliad,’ Atwood says, deadpan. ‘What?’ the woman asks. ‘The Iliad, it’s about the Trojan war,’ Atwood replies. ‘Okay, I will look for that,’ the woman says, flustered.”
From report on vulture.com
Most disastrous literary broadcaster
“The omens looked favourable as Will Self took his place on the Just a Minute panel. Yet it all went horribly wrong. Apparently impelled by Poe’s ‘imp of the perverse’, the psychogeographer and Booker-shortlisted novelist kept on blundering, giving the impression of being incapable of simply shutting up. From the outset he repeatedly interrupted other panellists on pedantic grounds, apparently seeing this as funny, but he was always wrong. Then he was told off by chair Nicholas Parsons for the way these botched interventions were irritating the others, the studio audience and listeners by stopping the programme flowing — told off not just once but twice, which may be unprecedented.”
A Radio 4 car crash covered in Private Eye
Unluckiest biographer
“He spent seven years travelling the world [researching his three-volume biography of Graham Greene] at great harm to his health. In Oaxaca, Mexico, he fell ill with gangrene (as Greene had done before), and had 15ft of his intestine removed. In Panama, he was met by gunfire in the streets, and in Liberia he chanced upon a revolution, succumbed to tropical diabetes and had his hearing damaged by a thug who pushed a revolver in his ear.”
Obituary of Greene’s Boswell, Norman Sherry, The Daily Telegraph