Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration edited by Hannah Ellis
In this ragged collection of tributes to the work of the Welsh national bard, caution occasionally moderates the commemoration. The poet Don Paterson’s dismay at Thomas’s high camp and Seamus Heaney’s distaste for his “tourist-board cliché” is disputed, though Owen Sheers, a modern Welsh poet, admits that the potency of teenage intoxication with the poetry of Thomas cannot be sustained indefinitely. Testimony to the drink that got the better of him is given in a story that he gave away manuscripts to a BBC man in a pub for booze: “They get bits of paper, I get pints of beer.” He got more than beer from three literary groupies, all called Margaret, who bailed him out of pecuniary problems. Their husbands were not best pleased. Poets, critics, fans and family do not provide a focused portrait of Thomas, but their assessments may provoke new thoughts that will survive this centenary year of his birth.
Dylan Thomas: A Centenary Celebration edited by Hannah Ellis, Bloomsbury, 258pp, £20; ebook £16.99. To buy this book for £17, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
Belles and Whistles: Five Journeys Through Time on Britain’s Trains by Andrew Martin
The days when Laurence Olivier could tuck a white napkin under his chin and bolt down a full English breakfast while commuting between Brighton and London by train have long gone the way of porters, advance luggage, Pullman cars, the occasional trunk murder and Agatha Christie novels, or indeed anything resembling luxury and romance. Only the evocative names and iconic period travel posters of famous trains remain: the Brighton Belle, the Golden Arrow to Paris, the Cornish Riviera Express, the Flying Scotsman to Edinburgh and the Caledonian Sleeper. Andrew Martin, a connoisseur of railways, boards the modern replacements for these beacons of glamour and takes an enjoyably bitter-sweet journey of contrasts between romance and reality. His wonderfully well-informed, anecdotal prose punches more than just tickets as he rough-rides the rails, kicks his heels at stations and resists the larky lavatory humour on Virgin trains.
Belles and Whistles: Five Journeys Through Time on Britain’s Trains by Andrew Martin, Profile, 282pp, £15.99; ebook £12.99. To buy this book for £13.99, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134
The Temporary Bride: A Memoir of Food and Love in Iran by Jennifer Klinec
In search of the perfect Persian rice and other culinary secrets of Iran ancient and modern, thirtysomething Jennifer Klinec was charmed by “the legacy of a country where women are compared to food — her breasts are like pomegranates, her lips like ripe dates”. Pretty much the first man she meets, young Vahid, develops an appetite for her, and soon they are spooning and mooning like lovers do. This is amour sans frontiers, On the surface, Klinec’s story is a foodie romance, but her heritage as a child of Hungarian-Croatian parents, raised in Canada, living in London, about to marry an Iranian, is an adventure in a globalised world. Love laughs at rigorously controlled borders. Sweet.
The Temporary Bride: A Memoir of Food and Love in Iran by Jennifer Klinec, Virago, 212pp, £13.99; ebook £7.99. To buy this book for £12.59, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or call 0845 2712134