Dave Eggers enjoys “soccer’s” minority status in the US, he says in The Thinking Fan’s Guide to the World Cup. “If you were soccer, the sport of kings, would you want the adulation of a people who elected Bush and Cheney, not once but twice?” he reasons. But would soccer want the adulation of someone who doesn’t know that the “sport of kings” is horseracing?
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Susan Hill, an Orange Prize judge in 1996, writes on her blog: “The management team is feminist PC new Labour personified. It is the only prize I have judged where I was really, really unhappy with the whole tone of the way it was run . . .” Hill was not unhappy with Helen Dunmore’s A Spell of Winter as the winner but wishes it had been Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Blue Flower.
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The Man Booker Prize finds it hard to hide the winner for the few hours between the judges’ meeting and official announcement. The Impac Dublin Literary Award kept its news secret from March 22 until Tuesday. The victor was Colm Tóibín’s The Master.
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Until the mid-1990s, the Government did not even acknowledge the existence of MI6. Now it has sanctioned an official history, by Keith Jeffery, of Queens University, Belfast. But it will stop in 1949. Bloomsbury will publish in 2010 — a year after Christopher Andrew’s history of MI5 for Penguin.
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Nearly £80,000 was handed out at the Society of Authors’ Awards and the Smith/Laird household took £13,500. Fresh from the £30,000 Orange Prize, Zadie Smith, won a £3,500 Somerset Maugham Award; her husband Nick Laird took the £10,000 Betty Trask Prize for Utterly Monkey. Others should stick to awards for which the couple aren’t eligible, perhaps.
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NICHOLAS CLEE