1 ‘Definition of a classic: a book everyone is assumed to have read and often thinks they have.’ Alan Bennett, Independent on Sunday, January 1991.

2 Andy Burnham, former Culture Secretary, from a speech to the Public Libraries Association, 9 October 2008.

3 San Jose Mercury News, 7 June 2009.

4 While the mug is blue, the cat itself is ginger.

5 In the interests of full, Patrick Bateman-like disclosure, here are the brands which make up this breakfast. Grapefruit: Jaffa, pink, organic. Orange juice: Grove Fresh Pure, organic. Bread: Kingsmill, wholemeal, medium-sliced. Low-fat spread: Flora Light. Marmite: n/a. Coffee: Percol Americano filter coffee, fairtrade, organic, strength: 4. Sundays – All-butter croissants: Sainsbury’s, ‘Taste the Difference’. Jam: Bonne Maman Conserve, strawberry. I drink the orange juice from a type of Ikea glass called Svepa which, through a process of trial and error, I have determined is the perfect size for consuming a carton of orange juice in equal measures over four successive mornings. Then I go out and disembowel a dog.

6 ‘I sometimes feel like Nietzsche in Ecce Homo, feeling it appropriate to give an account of his dietary habits, like his taste for “thick oil-free cocoa”, convinced that nothing that concerns him could be entirely without interest.’ Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies.

7 I am aware The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail was published long before The Da Vinci Code. The Albion Bookshop has since closed down.

8 The book is orange, the cat is black.

9 ‘Good Heavens!’

10 ‘I need a smoke!’

11 ‘Elena, my love, there is something we need to discuss . . .’

1 Formerly Hancock’s Half Hour, and nothing to do with the Will Smith movie Hancock, though no less hilarious. The title changed in 1961 after the departure of Sid James.

2 A knowing transposition? The correct title of Russell’s book is Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.

3 George Eliot was a woman, real name Mary Ann Evans. For minor comic effect, however, I have left Hancock’s words unaltered, thus giving you, the reader, the impression that he, Hancock, thinks George Eliot is a man. Ha ha! Sorry for these nit-picking footnotes, by the way, I know they disrupt the flow, but fans of George Eliot, Tony Hancock, Bertrand Russell et al. are an unforgiving lot and it is necessary to reassure them that what they are reading is unimpeachably correct, to the extent that I have compromised, even ruined, the opening of this chapter in order to secure their trust, solely to prevent the wholesale dismissal of a book it has taken me almost five years to write, simply because they, the so-called experts, might mistakenly assume that I don’t realise George Eliot was a woman. Of course George Eliot was a woman! But where experts are concerned, it goes without saying that nothing goes without saying.

4 Our university may have considered itself progressive but these eleven words earned him an F (for TELLING THE TRUTH).

5 If one were to plot a graph where the ‘x’ axis is ‘high culture’ and the ‘y’ axis is ‘low culture’, with Mozart at the top of the former and The Muppet Show at the far end of the latter, Ian McEwan’s corpus would perfectly bisect the two – the Bonne Maman Conserve in a Wonderloaf baguette.

6 In a neat QED, I have stolen the phrase ‘endless, numbered days’ from the title of the best Iron & Wine album Our Endless Numbered Days.

7 From ‘On Reading and Books’. Though it was written a hundred and fifty years ago, this essay by Schopenhaeur still has much to tell us. Also, for nineteenth-century German philosophy, it is significantly funnier than you might expect.

8 Not the sort of comparison F.R. Leavis would make, eh readers? Actually, Frank much preferred Nemesis™ at Alton Towers, which he described in a letter to friends as both ‘physically and conceptually rigorous in the Greek classical tradition’ and ‘wicked – I totally spilt my drink and crisps’.

9 ‘I made the mistake of going on a TV quiz show and admitting that I’d never read Middlemarch . . . and I don’t think I’ll ever live it down. When I saw I was in trouble I went out and bought it, and I’m planning to read it. I hear it’s good.’ Salman Rushdie to John Haffenden, 1983.

10 An echo of Roger Hargreaves here. I am thinking particularly of the words with which he draws Mr Strong to its droll yet satisfying conclusion – ‘Ice cream! Ha ha!’

1 This is a headache. I have divided the books along these lines but a similar exercise using the writers’ nationalities would produce a markedly different result. Post Office, for example, is a distinctively American novel by an author who was, strictly speaking, German. Somerset Maugham, whose stories are synonymous with England and Englishness, was born, passed much of his life in and died in France. The Communist Manifesto is the work of a couple of Prussians. Murdoch, Tressell and Beckett were native Dubliners, but would one categorise The Sea, The Sea or The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists as Irish novels? I don’t know. I don’t know how it works. No doubt someone from the TLS will be in touch.

2 ‘Uncle Vanya, we must go on. We’ve no choice! All we can do is go on living . . . all through the endless days and evenings . . . we will get through them . . . whatever fate brings. We’ll work for others until we’re old, there’ll be no rest for us till we die. And when the time comes, we’ll go without complaining and we’ll remember that we wept, and that we suffered, and that life was bitter, but God will take pity on us! . . .’ Anton Chekhov, Uncle Vanya, Act 4.

I always wanted to copy out this speech in the ‘Further Comments’ box of my annual appraisal form.

3 In fact, the TUC now owns the original handwritten manuscript of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists. It can be browsed in its entirety at www.unionhistory.info/ragged/ragged.php.

4 In the late 1960s, the film director Jean-Luc Godard denounced the French film industry as inherently bourgeois and announced that henceforth he would only produce work which conformed to his increasingly Maoist political beliefs. This resulted in several short films that whatever one’s opinion of them as cinematic art – and I think they are pretty wonderful – are unambiguously terrible propaganda. British Sounds, which Godard made around this time for (of all people) London Weekend Television, consists of uninterrupted footage of the deafening production line at Ford’s plant in Dagenham, Essex, a naked woman wandering up and down stairs in a flat, interviews with a group of Ford employees, a generic bunch of hirsute students sitting around and chatting and, finally, a montage sequence of clenched fists punching through paper Union Jack flags. It is laughably pretentious and woefully inscrutable. Had the director been bold enough to screen this for the workers at Dagenham, they would have been more likely to rise up and seize Jean-Luc Godard than the means of production. British Sounds was never broadcast by LWT, but these days you can find most of it on YouTube.

1 Morrissey bought two copies of a book by Bruce Foxton (bass) and Rick Buckler (drums) of The Jam about what a bastard Paul Weller had been to them by splitting the group and abandoning them to fend for themselves. ‘That’s not supposed to be very good,’ I said. ‘Mm,’ smiled Moz, ‘but they’re not for me.’ Do you think they were intended for Morrissey’s estranged Smiths bandmates Andy Rourke (the bass guitar) and Mike Joyce (the drums)? I do.

Princess Diana, in the period when she was separated from Prince Charles and trying to assert her independence by making tentative outings to McDonald’s, Harvey Nichols, etc., chose something from the psychology section about the effects of bad fathering on children with eating disorders. The manager of the shop immediately forbade any of us from contacting a tabloid newspaper with this scoop, though I am revealing it here for posterity. Towards the end of the transaction, a paparazzo ran into the shop and tried to snap Diana and, to a far lesser extent, me. The next morning, the manager wrote to Kensington Palace to assure them that this breach of privacy had nothing to do with us and the Princess should feel confident that she could return to our portals whenever she wished, discretion was our watchword, etc., etc. It was that sort of shop.

Dustin Hoffman, though thoroughly amiable, said and did nothing worth noting nor did he buy a book. This should in no way be taken as an implicit criticism of him. One well-known actress, a local resident of the shop, pulled lots of memorable stunts which would probably amuse and enthral you but even twenty years later I am reluctant to publish them and give this individual the slightest whiff of publicity, even though she is no longer with us. It was not unknown for the entire staff to hide in the stockroom rather than deal with her petulant, ill-mannered demands. She was one of the rudest human beings it has ever been my misfortune to encounter but I am not going to reveal her identity here. Let’s just say it’s a pity her character doesn’t get stabbed through the throat with a camera tripod specially adapted for the purpose at the climax of [NAME OF FILM REDACTED BUT IF YOU’VE GOT ANYTHING ABOUT YOU, YOU’LL KNOW WHAT IT IS] and leave it at that.

2 Though the event was held at the behest of Booker, Dame Iris may have chosen to read from her most recent novel The Green Knight, rather than The Sea, The Sea, and I am writing about the wrong book. Thank you, the then-future Mrs Miller, for the declarification.

3 This has an unhappy resonance with the domestic arrangements of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell, who would invite guests to dinner at their Islington bedsitter and treat them to a National Assistance feast of rice and sardines, with differently-cooked rice and golden syrup for pudding. ‘One of the most bizarre and terrible meals I’ve ever eaten.’ Charles Monteith, former chairman of Faber & Faber.

1 Turn to Appendix One: The List of Betterment, for additional examples of American cult writing, some of which we shall return to later, e.g. 37, On the Road; 39, American Psycho; 40, The Dice Man. I never got round to Naked Lunch or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, both of which may be found in Appendix Three: Books I Still Intend to Read.

2 One evening, on a late shift at the shop, I was standing alone at the ground-floor till. That afternoon, I had been to a funeral. I had come straight to work and so had not had a chance to change out of the black suit, white shirt and black tie I had worn to the service. I was feeling tired and sad.

Customer: (STARTLED) Mr Pink! Er, has anyone said to you . . . ? Me: Yes, they have. Can I help you?

Customer: It’s amazing! Let’s go to work! Would you mind if I ran and got a couple of mates?

Me: Actually, I have just been to a funeral today, so I’m not really . . .

Customer: Oh yeah, of course. Sorry. (PAUSE.) Can I bring them in tomorrow to have a look at you?

That night, I shaved off the beard.

3 One of the groups I used to go and see at the Garage, Subterania, ULU, etc. was the Auteurs, led by the dyspeptic Luke Haines, a man whose demeanour, onstage and off, is more Ignatius J. Reilly than Iggy Pop. See his hilariously splenetic memoirs Bad Vibes and Post Everything (both Heinemann) for proof. Haines’ album 21^st Century Man contains a song called ‘Love Letter to London’ which eloquently addresses those of us who have chosen to leave the city behind. ‘They said that they loved you / But they used you as a playground / When they were young,’ he hisses.

4 This is a statement of fact. On our line, people read newspapers, or work documents, or watched portable DVD players, or played on games consoles, or played with their phones, or nodded off. Books were relatively thin on the ground. In a year, I never saw one other person with their nose in what might be termed a ‘classic’. In London, on the other hand, I frequently witnessed people on the bus or Tube engrossed in Hardy, Lessing, Flaubert, Einstein, the Koran and, on one occasion, Hitler. Does reading Mein Kampf make you a better person than the one playing Angry Birds? Certainly not! But it does make you more interesting. Don’t shoot the messenger.

5 I did not realise Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky was a trilogy until I started it, otherwise I could have claimed it as three novels rather than one. Conversely, The Unnamable is the final part of a trilogy, also comprising Molloy and Malone Dies. I knew this in advance and chose to ignore it. Why? Probably because I guessed Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky and The Unnamable were better-known quantities, and sounded more impressive, than The Plains of Cement and The Samuel Beckett Trilogy. Again, don’t shoot the messenger, even though, in this case, the messenger and the message are one and the same.

1 This was the gist, at any rate. I don’t watch Loose Women with a Dictaphone running.

2 The Wikipedia page devoted to inaccuracies in The Da Vinci Code lists dozens of specific mis-statements and errors.

3 ‘The worst kind of arse gravy’ is a tautology, unless Stephen Fry’s books represent the best kind.

1 The extracts here are taken from Louise and Aylmer Maude’s translation of Anna Karenina, which was approved by Tolstoy himself: ‘Better translators . . . could not be invented.’ I cannot vouch for its fidelity to the cadences of the original Russian but it is a lyrical read and full of personality – though whether it is the author’s is a moot point. Translation is a tricky and competitive business, partly because of the personalities of those involved. There can never be a right answer, yet academics and publishers are always pushing for fresh, ‘definitive’ editions. In recent years, another crack husband and wife team, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, have cornered the market in crisp new versions of works by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol et al. Their Anna was selected as an Oprah Book Club choice and sold several hundred thousand copies. ‘Tolstoy is not reader-friendly,’ Pevear told the New Yorker in 2005. ‘Tolstoy’s style is the least interesting thing about him, though it is very peculiar.’ So perhaps the lyricism I detected in Anna Karenina was the Maudes’ and not Tolstoy’s after all. But wait! Pevear ‘has never mastered conversational Russian’, notes the New Yorker, and it is his wife who actually speaks the language. I tell you, it’s a hall of mirrors. Fundamentally, there is probably no substitute for the original Russian; but unless we accept a substitute we don’t get to read Tolstoy at all.

2 At the performance I attended of Sunday in the Park with George, we sat behind the novelist and intellectual Andrew O’Hagan, who bought an ice cream during the interval and appeared to enjoy the show. In 2010, O’Hagan published the novel The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe, the narrator of which is a talking dog. Having proved he too could give voice to a notorious hound, O’Hagan’s next project was ghost-writing the ‘unauthorised autobiography’ of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. They say Sondheim has been approached to work on a musical adaptation.

1 In his article on Patrick Hamilton, Dan Rhodes calls The Midnight Bell ‘a cover version’ of Of Human Bondage.

2 ‘All opinions are not equal. Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well-supported in logic and argument than others.’ Douglas Adams, interview with The American Atheist.

3 One former marketing director of the book chain Waterstones once told me that he got round the problem of constantly being asked ‘Have you read X or Y?’ with the foolproof response: ‘Not personally’, a formulation I have utilised many times since.

4 For more on this topic, Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read (Granta), is warmly recommended. NB. I have not read it.

5 There are, of course, exceptions. You will have had the experience of asking for a widely-reviewed title by someone you consider a well-known author, only to be met with a blank stare or a request to spell ‘Brown’. Fortunately, you have the humility to acknowledge that you are not the world – nor are you the sort to enjoy lording it over a poorly-paid shop worker. If only all customers were as patient and wise as you are.

I once worked alongside someone who, by her own admission, knew next to nothing about literature. She once asked me to recommend a book by Graham Greene. ‘Why don’t you try The End of the Affair?’ I suggested. ‘What, just the end? Not the whole thing?’ she replied. But she was cheerful and well-spoken and many of the regular customers came to ask for her by name, and were sorry when she left to set up her own catering business. She is now a millionaire.

6 NB. One might swap round the names ‘Tolstoy’ and ‘Titchmarsh’ here without altering the thrust of the argument. If I loved the novels of Alan Titchmarsh but people insisted on buying that bloody War and Peace all the time, it would be equally infuriating.

7 I know the character’s name is Smith and not Tom Courtenay. I am deliberately referring to the 1962 film adaptation rather than Alan Sillitoe’s original novella because I have seen the former but not read the latter. So piss off.

1 I still have Al Hine’s book The Beatles in Help!. I can see it on the shelf from here. Of course, I have never read it.

2 Daddy has not had time to get changed out of his office clothes: pork-pie hat, brown brogues, blue tartan suit, bright red tie and socks. In fact, Judith Kerr never actually tells us that Daddy goes to an office, only that he is out for much of the day and he would never knock because he’s ‘got his key’. Dressed like that, I think Daddy is either a small-time gangster or working the halls.

3 For lots more in-depth analysis of The Tiger Who Came to Tea by frustrated English graduates with too much time on their hands, check the numerous discussion threads archived at Mumsnet.

4 For U.S. readers, Croydon is a suburb of South London, synonymous with much that is perceived to be drab and depressing about British suburbia. In 1999, the rock star David Bowie said in an interview, ‘It represented everything I didn’t want in my life, everything I wanted to get away from. I think it’s the most derogatory thing I can say about somebody or something: “God, it’s so f**king Croydon!”’. As will become apparent in this section, this is not a point of view I share with Mr ‘Stardust’ (sic.), who grew up not on the planet Mars, as he would have you believe, but in the neighbouring suburb of Bromley.

5 The Moon’s a Balloon is terrific, obviously, but The People’s Almanac (1975) is an extraordinary 1500pp repository of whatever information its compilers found colourful, revelatory or entertaining, the useful and useless side-by-side – the Wikipedia of its day. It was with The People’s Almanac that I first scared myself stupid with the doomsday prophecies of Nostradamus, studied the inconsistencies of the Warren Report into the assassination of President Kennedy and, at the age of twelve, convinced myself that I had somehow contracted syphilis. What a book.

6 Eleanor Hibbert, 1906–1993, sold more than 100 million books in her lifetime. Jean Plaidy and Victoria Holt were just two of her bestseller noms de plume.

7 ‘Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.’ Michel Houellebecq, H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life.

8 A certain sort of reader might expect me to renounce Croydon, Smiths and even book tokens but I won’t do it. I loved all three. The same reader might expect me to report that my love of books was nurtured by an independent children’s bookshop, a magical cavern of storytelling, etc. etc. etc., but it wasn’t, because there wasn’t one. We can’t all live in Muswell Hill.

9 An unfulfilled hankering for Sea Monkeys and Twinkies stayed with me for years. In 1998, I begged the author Shawn Levy, visiting the UK to publicise his new book, to bring with him a box or a packet or a bag of Twinkies, however they damn came, so I could finally discover what the legendary enchanted sweetbreads tasted like. When Shawn told his two young boys what the Englishman wanted, they looked at him in amazement. ‘But Dad,’ they said. ‘Why??’ And with good reason, as it turned out. Twinkies are horrible. (I note this more in sadness than anger. At the time of writing, Hostess has just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.)

10 The Puffin Club was an offshoot of Puffin Books, the UK’s leading publisher of books for children, itself part of Penguin Books Ltd. It was the brainchild of Puffin’s inspirational editor-in-chief Kaye Webb.

11 Fantagraphics Books’ ongoing publication of every Peanuts strip cartoon in attractive hardback volumes, with introductions by fans like Matt Groening and Jonathan Franzen, is one of the most welcome publishing programmes of recent times. It is to be hoped that the project, which commenced in 2004, reaches completion before printed, hardbound books become obsolete – I fear it will be a race to the finish.

12 I did say arguably. There are still many fantastic programmes being made for children in the UK but few of them are based on books, and definitely not vintage books. Classic children’s drama of this sort has almost entirely vanished from the schedules, except at Christmas when the BBC or ITV will dramatise The Borrowers for the umpteenth time. The spirit of Jackanory survives more in the bedtime story on CBeebies, or Stephen Fry’s readings of Harry Potter, than it does in the current incarnation of Jackanory itself, Jackanory Junior, which treats its young viewers as though every single one of them is suffering from chronic attention deficit disorder, such is the bombardment of sound effects, animated inserts and green-screen overload. These days, decent adaptations of English literature, classic or contemporary, are more likely to come to us via Hollywood, e.g. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Nanny McPhee, The Secret Garden and the Harry Potter movies, often made in the UK with American money.

13 Pedants, I know Marni Nixon replaced Audrey Hepburn’s vocal tracks on the My Fair Lady soundtrack, and CinemaScope movies were only ever shown pan-and-scan on television. Have a heart! In fact, technically speaking none of these films qualifies as true ’Scope: Oliver! is Panavision, My Fair Lady is Super Panavision 70 and Kiss Me Kate, though announced as CinemaScope, was filmed and released in 3-D.

14 Again, I am well aware Marlon Brando was not in the original Broadway cast of Guys and Dolls and that he only played Sky Masterson in the movie. There was no commercial release of the film soundtrack available at this time, owing to a contractual dispute about which record company owned the rights to Frank Sinatra’s vocal performances. I merely wished to make a cheap jibe at the expense of the late Marlon Brando, while drawing your attention to my own bell-like singing voice. Don’t miss the audiobook! P.S. Guys and Dolls was shot in CinemaScope.

15 Paul Weller, like Morrissey, is someone with a single-minded loyalty to his teenage self. When he appeared on Desert Island Discs in 2007, aged 49, he chose Absolute Beginners as the book he would take with him to the desert island.

16 A British teenager’s reading list in 1984 might typically consist of Orwell, Brighton Rock, Brave New World and the plays of Joe Orton, as well as the unofficial American set texts like Catcher in the Rye, On the Road and Catch-22.

17 Unbeknownst to Alex’s grandmother, the rejuvenated Puffin Club was being operated by the Penguin Group, who had quietly outsourced it to the mail-order company The Book People on a three-year contract. In late 2012, this arrangement was abruptly terminated, with the result that the Puffin Club is once again on ‘indefinite hiatus’ while Penguin decides what to do with it. I tried to explain to a heartbroken Alex that the reason he wouldn’t be receiving any more special bookplates, Puffin Posts or new books was because of the differing financial aims and expectations of the various parties involved in running the Puffin Club franchise in a rapidly-evolving marketplace. But he cried anyway.

1 ‘The Dickensian thing is to us what the Western is to America. Just as it’s their brave new frontier which defines America culturally, for England it’s the Victorian era. And since that time we’ve been kind of relegated and degraded and decaying.’ Russell Brand, interview, Daily Telegraph.

2 The BBC finally produced a solid adaptation of The Mystery of Edwin Drood in 2012 to mark the bicentenary of Dickens’ birth.

3 J.-K. Huysmans, Against Nature.

4 The Diary of a Nobody is generally thought to have been written by George Grossmith alone, with his brother contributing ideas and the illustrations.

5 This distinction may be demonstrated by two differing adaptations of The Diary of a Nobody. The 2007 BBC TV series is a definite case of ‘laughing at’ the character: Hugh Bonneville’s Pooter comes across as vulgar and risible. Compare this with the sublime reading given by Arthur Lowe for BBC radio in the 1970s. His Pooter is pompous, hilarious and a recognisable human being to boot. We may recall that Arthur Lowe was not only famous for playing the Pooterish – excuse me – Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army but also worked with left-ish filmmakers like Lindsay Anderson (The White Bus, If . . . , O Lucky Man!) and Peter Medak (The Ruling Class).

6 Clever wording, cheers. I think I may have stolen this phrase from Simon Munnery’s comedy sloganeer Alan Parker, Urban Warrior; he intended it as satire. Perhaps we should move to reclaim the word Pooter from the anti-suburban haters. Might it be possible for sneered-at suburbanites to start referring to themselves with pride as ‘Pootaz With Attitude’? Straight Outta Croydon, it takes a handful of people to hold us back, etc.

7 From ‘Middlebrow’, The Death of the Moth (Hogarth Press, 1947).

8 Why do so many men yearn to spend time with one another exclusively – lads’ nights, down the pub, up the steam-baths? When I look back on my life, I wish I had spent more time in the company of women, not less.

9 Driscoll cites several examples of the ‘gendered ridicule’ of book groups, from the nineteenth century through to Desperate Housewives: ‘The reading practices of contemporary reading groups are particularly susceptible to characterization as middlebrow. Book clubs are middle-class institutions, part of the middle-class package of values that includes education and self-improvement . . . These members are overwhelmingly women.’ (‘Not the normal kind of chicklit’? Richard & Judy and the Feminized Middlebrow by Beth Driscoll, in The Richard & Judy Book Club Reader edited by Jenni Ramone and Helen Cousins.) It should be noted that although the word ‘middlebrow’ retains many of its pejorative connotations in everyday usage, it is a respectable term in the groves of academia. Please see the rather marvellous Middlebrow Network (www.middlebrow-network.com) for numerous examples from across the spectrum of opinion, not least this 1925 definition of the term from Punch magazine, home of Mr Pooter: ‘The BBC claim to have discovered a new type, the “middlebrow”. It consists of people who are hoping that some day they will get used to the stuff they ought to like.’

10 Spectator, Independent, Observer and Time Out.

1 Edited highlights of this blog are available to read via my website at mill-i-am.com or as ‘bonus content’ in the ebook edition of The Year of Reading Dangerously. I am told my thoughts on The Epic of Gilgamesh represent a strong ‘incentive to purchase’. Hmm.

2 If FANTASTIC FOUR #50 PASSED YOU BY, you’ll have to take MY WORD this is what happened! THE TALE IS TOO TWISTY TO RE-TELL HERE! NUFF SAID! – anFRACTUOUS andy.

3 Co-creator Jack Kirby’s original vision was of the Surfer as the Fallen Angel and Galactus as an Old Testament Jehovah. Under writer Stan Lee’s direction, the character more closely resembles another religious archetype, the Wandering Jew. The pioneers of the comics industry, many of whom were Jewish, are the subject of Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Chabon has said that the character of Joe Kavalier was partly inspired by Jack Kirby. I must read that book, it sounds every bit as fascinating as I keep telling people it is.

4 For the uninitiated, ‘Krautrock’ is a xenophobiasm (see below) coined by British music journalists in the 1970s to define this wave of German progressive music. Some prefer the term ‘Kosmische Musik’, denoting the genre’s deep-space/inner-space connotations. To complicate matters, several German groups subsequently adopted the K-word themselves, e.g. ‘Krautrock’, the sehr kosmische opening track of Faust’s fourth album, Faust IV. However one labels it, this music has remained a touchstone for experimental and alternative musicians for over forty years. No two groups sounded exactly alike but one could expect to hear some or all of the following on their records: long, experimental pieces filling the entire side of an LP; wailing, distorted electric guitar; unfathomable and often improvised vocals and chanting; a metronomic drumbeat referred to as ‘motorik’ or ‘apache’; slow, glacial drones played on the only Moog synthesiser in West Germany. The author of Krautrocksampler, in the introduction alone, defines it as, variously, ‘the German pre-punk self-awareness trip of all time . . . a substantial artform with considerable stamina . . . a whole Youth-nation working out their blues . . . some of the most astonishing, evocative, heroic glimpses of Man at his Peak of Artistic Magic’. Julian H. Cope: never knowingly underwhelmed.

‘Xenophobiasm’ is a neologism coined by me to define a xenophobic neologism, rather than an orgasm of racist origin, e.g. one brought on by reading the Daily Mail.

5 My original copy of Krautrocksampler has never turned up and, as the owner of the blog noted, this PDF looks like it was scanned by someone in a hurry. Pages 98 and 99 are missing, which means I may never know how Cope feels about the two Amon Düül II albums, Carnival in Babylon and Yeti, ‘the Ur-Kraut album of All’, though I can hazard a guess. Do you have these stray pages? Do you know someone who does? Get in touch, please. OCD’s kickin’ in pretty bad, man!

6 Of his preference for the Travelodge experience, in 2000 Cope told a BBC film crew: ‘After about six or seven years of travelling I started realising that I was staying more and more in Travelodges and people were asking me why. “Why are you staying in Travelodges all the time? They’re totally characterless, they’re totally anonymous, they’re always the same.” I said, Precisely. I said, I’m just getting fed up with travelling for seven hours, being exhausted after a full day’s fieldwork, and then having to listen to, you know, some sweet biddy who says, “Ooh, you know, this is the porch that we built two years ago.” And I just feel like, Gimme me the keys, Bitch! . . . Is “Gimme me the keys, Bitch!” too compassionless? I think it’s probably more rock, isn’t it?’ Inspired by Cope, I stayed exclusively in Travelodges while conducting fieldwork on Britain’s crazy golf courses for my first book Tilting at Windmills; likewise, every word of The Year of Reading Dangerously has been written while wearing shades and a misinterpretable hat. I regret nothing, Mein Führer.

7 Plenty more where that came from at: www.headheritage.co.uk/julian_cope/qa2000ce/krautrock.

8 Compare with Jung’s essay, ‘The Stages of Life’: ‘Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past, and the other from the future . . . Just as a childish person shrinks back from the unknown in the world and in human existence, so the grown man shrinks back from the second half of life. It is as if unknown and dangerous tasks were expected of him; or as if he were threatened with sacrifices and losses which he does not wish to accept; or as if his life up to now seemed so fair and so precious that he could not do without it.’ Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), pp104–108. ‘I paraphrase his [Jung’s] stuff all the time,’ Cope told Simon Reynolds in 1991. ‘He’s incredible.’

1 Oh, bad luck! Turner painted many remarkable canvases along this particular stretch of the Kent coast; but the majority of La Mer was composed in a sea-facing room at the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, which is, of course, on the south coast, not the east. So you only get half a point. Yes, the footnotes are back. Did you miss them? I left them out of the previous chapter because it took the form of a letter or email and not even I annotate my own emails.

2 Metaphor! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!

3 This is not a euphemism for some bedroom indelicacy. When Tina and I moved in together in the early 1990s, we rented the attic flat above the headquarters of the Victorian Society in Bedford Park, the garden suburb area of Chiswick in West London. The Victorian Society is a charity dedicated to the study and preservation of Victorian and Edwardian architecture and other arts. Amongst its guiding lights were John Betjeman, Hugh Casson and the German architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, founding editor of the classic Buildings of England series. As detailed by Susie Harries in Nikolaus Pevsner: The Life, Pevsner did not compile these books alone. At his side was his wife Lola. When undertaking research for one of his guides, Pevsner insisted Lola ferry him around in their Morris Traveller, wait in the car while he jotted down his observations of a church or guildhall, drive him on to the guest house she had booked, eat the sandwiches she had made for them both before setting out, and stay awake until he had finished typing out his notes. The following day, the same routine, for year after year, until her husband had filled the pages of more than thirty volumes and been justifiably acclaimed as one of the pioneering figures of post-war British cultural life. In fact, Nikolaus Pevsner knew how to drive all along but preferred not to; and Lola Pevsner predeceased her husband by twenty years. It is this arrangement to which Tina is referring here.

4 They have been renovating that place for months now, the inconsiderate bastards. Their intrusion into the text would be the perfect illustration of what I am describing here, if only it weren’t so bloody loud. ‘Knocking, hammering, and tumbling things about has made the whole of my life a daily torment . . . I do not see why one fellow who is removing a load of sand or manure should obtain the privilege of killing in the bud the thoughts that are springing up in the heads of about ten thousand people successively.’ Schopenhauer, ‘On Noise’.

Other contradictatorial books, or books with a strong contradictatorial streak: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald, U & I: A True Story by Nicholson Baker, How Proust Can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton, Leadville by Edward Platt, as well as works by Cervantes, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, Julian Cope, Michel Houellebecq, Lemony Snicket and even Charlotte Brontë (‘Reader, I married him’) discussed elsewhere in this book. To this list, one might add the films of Jean-Luc Godard, or those of Patrick Keiller, or the stand-up comedy of Stewart Lee. Books about books, films about films, jokes about jokes. Again, this may be the influence of Douglas Adams, whose Hitchhiker’s novels are constantly punctuated or interrupted by extracts from the fictional Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (the one with DON’T PANIC inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover), either commenting on or disagreeing with whatever the reader has just been told. For this reason, the acid test of a book’s contradictatoriality is whether one can imagine it being read aloud by the late Peter Jones, the voice of the Book in the original Hitchhiker’s radio series.

5 As a parent, it has been instructive to discover that the deep, instinctive love I feel for my own child is counterbalanced by the antipathy I feel towards other people’s children. Pace Tolstoy, it is for this reason that great nations go to war.

6 Have you ever wondered how writers backed up their work in an age before computers, Mimeographs and even typewriters? They got their spouses to do it for them. Tolstoy made the Countess Tolstoy copy out the three-thousand-page manuscript of War and Peace in longhand, not once but seven times; small wonder she was testy. In the same period, she also ran the estate at Yasnaya Polyana, oversaw her husband’s business affairs, managed his literary career and bore him four children. All of which puts me asking for a lift to the shops into perspective, surely. Of course, a lot has changed since Tolstoy’s day. Tina was asked to write out the manuscript of this book only twice, a duty she discharged with a tremendous sense of post-Feminist empowerment, like I told her to.

7 Julian Cope recently announced that he was planning to sell off his record collection. ‘It’s 2012, brothers’n’sisters,’ he wrote, ‘and I have every intention of disposing of as much of our archives as I can – even personal effects and instruments – so that my family and I can travel more extensively and live unencumbered in these coming years. Forty years of vinyl? I gotta divest myself of some of these classics . . . Love on y’all, JULIAN (Lord Yatesbury).’ This is what I like about Cope; he can make something as mundane as having a bit of a clear-out sound like the affirmative action of a Forward-thinking MoFo. Encroaching clutter crisis? Er . . . Look out!

8 Tina’s order of translational preference: Louise and Aylmer Maude, then Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, then Rosemary Edmonds. She has the Constance Garnett on her Sony Reader but finds it to be ‘prissy’.

9 One reader of an early draft of this chapter raised an objection to this story. It’s so blissfully connubial, he told me, it just makes me want to puke. I wouldn’t have minded but he was Best Man at our wedding. Anyway, the conversation about War and Peace did actually happen in exactly the way I have laid it out here. If it makes you feel queasy, consider this an annotative indigestion tablet.

10 The CEO concerned really said this. On the bright side, perhaps in the future I shall be able to sell the extracts from Chapter IV concerning Charles Arrowby’s disgusting menus to whoever produces an app for The Sea, The Sea. It’s all content, isn’t it?

11 I don’t know why anyone was surprised by the phenomenal sales of Fifty Shades of Grey. When presented with some new technological breakthrough, it is only ever a matter of time before the human animal figures out how best to pornify it. The same thing occurred with previous innovations such as the gramophone record, the Internet and the Space Hopper.

12 The Top Five in full. 1) Drinking, eating. 2) Holding on to books, regardless of size. 3) Making models out of Play-Doh™ and sniffing fingers afterwards. 4) Giving Paul McCartney the double thumbs-up in the street and having him reciprocate with same. 5) Self-abuse.

FWIW, I believe Harold Bloom and I are in accord about at least two of the above, if not more.

13 Despite Amazon’s best efforts, other brands of ereader are available for purchase and my customer comments are applicable to any and all of them.

14 ‘The rejection of technology is only sound when it’s done through understanding. Rejection through ignorance or belief in the natural superiority of the old ways seems to me to be as bad as drably accepting all modernism.’ Julian Cope, Repossessed.

15 ‘This is perhaps the best rough test of what is literature and what is not. If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use reading it at all.’ Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying: An Observation.

16 Under the Volcano: A Hypertextual Companion, www.otago.ac.nz/english/lowry.

17 I am able to tell you with absolute certainty that the question took me two minutes and twenty-three seconds to ask – but felt much longer – because I recently discovered to my absolute horror that the whole of Adams’ interview at the ICA is now available to listen to online, as is my excruciating contribution from the audience. Twenty-five years on, it is even more mortifying than I remember it. If anyone reading this has a time machine and is thinking of going back to kill Hitler at birth, would you mind stopping off in The Mall in 1987 to kill me first? Thanks. Worst of all, this unwelcome entrance to the past has been propped open courtesy of the British Library. You people were meant to be my friends!